Читать книгу The Mysteries of Bilingualism. Unresolved Issues онлайн

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Bilingualism in the United States has traditionally been transitional – a passage, over one or two generations, from monolingualism in a minority language to monolingualism in English. However, there is an increasing awareness that the country’s knowledge of the languages of the world is a natural resource that should not be wasted. Hence a growing number of families are fostering bilingualism either by making sure the home’s minority language and culture are kept alive or by encouraging their children to acquire and use a second language.

As we saw in the preceding part, Canada obtains data both on language knowledge and language use in its censuses. Concerning language knowledge, it is a person’s ability to speak the language(s) well enough to conduct a conversation. For a child who has not yet learned to speak, this includes languages that the child is learning to speak at home.⁹ Two questions in the 2016 census get at language knowledge, and the combined results show that 39% of the population report being able to conduct a conversation in more than one language, of which 17.9% report that the languages involved are English and French. It is important to note that these percentages concern actual bilinguals but also potential bilinguals as some do not actually use two languages in their everyday life, even though they know a second language well enough to do so.