Читать книгу The Mysteries of Bilingualism. Unresolved Issues онлайн

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So the next stage in my quest was to write to Colin Baker to ask him where they had obtained that figure, or how they had worked it out. Over several exchanges of emails, he explained to me how they had guesstimated the figure. They put together a rough spreadsheet with estimates of each country’s bilingual population. They used Ethnologue, THE source about languages in the world today, to which they added several other sources. At the time, the language sources were incomplete (e.g., on the bilingual language minorities in China and in other large countries) or, quite simply, the data was inaccurate.

Colin Baker continued, “My memory is that we estimated that the ‘true’ value was probably between 50% and 70% if we were rather generous in our definition of a ‘bilingual’. Under 50% seemed too small and above 70% rather unlikely. While 60% would have been a midpoint, it would have been spurious and dishonest to suggest we could be that accurate. Hence ‘two thirds’ became a less spurious way of giving our generous guess.”