Читать книгу The Mysteries of Bilingualism. Unresolved Issues онлайн

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Four years after the 2012 survey, Eurostat published Foreign language skills statistics¹² in which levels of second language skills were examined. The results were equally varied for those who know their best-known foreign language at a proficient level (this means understanding a wide range of demanding texts, using a language flexibly, and mastering the language almost completely). Thus, more than half of respondents in Luxemburg, Sweden and Malta reached this proficiency level, whereas less than a quarter of the British, French, Polish, Romanians, Czechs and Italians did so.

With regard to language use, Europeans and their languages gives some interesting results. As we saw above, 54% of Europeans mentioned one other language when asked the question about the additional languages they speak well enough in order to be able to have a conversation. But when asked, “How often to do you use your first additional language?,” the mean percentage dropped down to 24% for everyday or almost everyday use. Thus, one in four Europeans are bilingual. Of course, once again there is a lot of variation, with percentages as high as 67% for Luxemburg, 49% for Malta, 44% for Latvia, 41% for Denmark, and so on, and as low as 7% for Portugal, 9% for Italy (but keep in mind that many Italians are bilingual in a regional dialect and Italian), and 11% for Poland. Two of the countries we discussed in the first part of this chapter, Belgium and the United Kingdom, have 29% and 28% respectively.