Читать книгу The Mysteries of Bilingualism. Unresolved Issues онлайн

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The outcome was that Swiss Statistics stated that a mere 15.8% of the Swiss population was bi- or multilingual. This was less than the percentages found in largely monolingual countries such as the United States and France (around 20% of bilinguals at the time). And yet, any visitor to Switzerland will have noticed how extensive bi- and multilingualism is in the country with people often using two or more languages in their everyday lives, and knowing at least one other learned in school. In the next part, we will see how the other questions in the Swiss Census allowed us to estimate a truer percentage of bilinguals.

In sum, finding out how many bilinguals there are in a country is particularly difficult. Some countries do not have language questions, others do but they are few in number and the results have little to say about bilingualism, and others still have enough questions but the data is not analyzed adequately so as to get at the extent of bilingualism in the country.