Читать книгу The Mysteries of Bilingualism. Unresolved Issues онлайн

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France and Switzerland are worth discussing separately. For France, the percentage given for daily or almost daily use is 19%, a figure that is very close to that of a large survey, “Etude de l’histoire familiale,” conducted in France itself in 1999 by the French Institute for Demographic Studies (INED). Three language questions were asked, and the third one gets at what we are interested in: “… do you find yourself talking with people close to you (partner, parents, friends, colleagues, store keepers…) in a language other than French? If so, which is it/are they?.” The first thing to note was that some 400 different languages were mentioned, a number that clearly shows that France is multilingual even though officially it is monolingual. There are regional languages, but most with far fewer speakers than before, and many immigrant languages such as Arabic, Berber, Turkish, Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, and so on. And to the question asked, 21% of the respondents stated that they speak a language other than French in their everyday life. We should note that many more inhabitants in France’s overseas territories use two languages regularly: 57% in Mayotte, 41% in New Caledonia, 38%, on Reunion Island, and so on.