Читать книгу The Mysteries of Bilingualism. Unresolved Issues онлайн
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Other fascinating results accompanied this new finding. First, the majority of these respondents were bilingual (26.1%), others were trilingual (10.4%) and still others quadrilingual (3.7%). As for the languages concerned, the greater number of bilinguals were Swiss German/German speakers, as expected, and the greater number of trilinguals concerned speakers of these two languages along with English. These new results were published in Grosjean (2013).
Estimating the Percentage of Bilinguals in the World
To end this chapter, it is worth moving up to the level of the world and trying to find out what could be the global percentage of people who are bi- or multilingual. I am reproducing below the post I wrote for my Psychology Today “Life as a bilingual” blog (Grosjean 2014).
When asked how many bilinguals there are in the world, I usually state that there are no precise figures but that probably half or slightly more than half of the world’s population is bilingual, that is uses two or more languages (or dialects) in everyday life.13 When asked to be more precise, I usually stay around the 50% mark. I immediately add that we are still a long way away from knowing exactly how many people are indeed bilingual. Rare are the national censuses that have a question pertaining to bi- or multilingualism, and when they do, the meaning they give to this notion can be very restrictive. In addition, those countries that only ask about languages, not bilingualism, can reflect a certain partiality concerning what it means to know a language, and then there are those countries that do not even ask language questions in their censuses.14