Читать книгу The Mysteries of Bilingualism. Unresolved Issues онлайн
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The 2016 census also examined the state of bilingualism at work.11 The proportion of workers who use more than one language at work was 15.4% in 2016, up from 13.9% in 2011. Were we to add the percentage of bilingualism at home and at work, we would obtain close to 35% of people who use two or more languages in their daily lives, without counting other activities though. But this percentage includes some people who are counted twice, once in the home and once at work, and so one needs to estimate a reduced combined percentage. For the 2016 census, collaborators at Statistics Canada could not help me with this, but for the 2011 census, Ms. Camille Bouchard-Colombe from the same bureau gave me an estimate of 26%. Since the level of bilingualism is higher both at home and in the work place in 2016, a fair estimate could be 28%. Thus, slightly more than a quarter of inhabitants in Canada are actual bilinguals.
It is interesting that there is a 11% difference between potential bilinguals (39%) and actual bilinguals (some 28%). This percentage, which can vary in size as we will see below, reflects the fact that some people can master two or more languages sufficiently to conduct a conversation in them but do not actually use them all on a regular basis. This is true in Canada but also in all other nations in the world.