Читать книгу The Mysteries of Bilingualism. Unresolved Issues онлайн

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One day, as I was watching Dr. Kim Potowski, Associate Professor of Hispanic linguistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, give her TEDx talk, “No child left monolingual” (Potowski 2013), I heard her say, “Now the fact is that 65% of the world today is bilingual or multilingual….” I was intrigued by this sudden jump in numbers and so I wrote to Dr. Potowski to ask her what the source was for her figure. She kindly replied that she had found it in a book published in 2002 which I immediately consulted, but I had no success finding the figure. I left it at that although her number seemed really high to me.

More than a year later, it was a pleasant surprise to hear from Dr. Potowski again who told me that she had finally found the source. The figure had been given by Colin Baker and his colleague, Sylvia Prys Jones, both of Bangor University in Wales, in the Preface to their monumental The Encyclopedia of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education (1998). In it, they state, “… around two-thirds of the world’s population are bilingual.”