Читать книгу The Mysteries of Bilingualism. Unresolved Issues онлайн

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I asked Colin Baker if they had taken the mean of percentages worked out for each country, in essence giving each country the same weight even if the populations are of different sizes, or if they had taken the total estimated number of bilinguals, across all countries, divided by the world’s population at the time. He replied that they had used the latter approach but that they had to exclude some countries from the total for sheer lack of data.

Colin Baker added an important remark to this. They had included those learning a second language, particularly English, which adds literally millions of people to the numerator. Based on this, and on the fact that at the time the numerical bilingual data was so poor, he now thinks that it would have been wiser to give upper and lower boundaries for the guesstimate, that is, between 50% and 70%, “… as this would have better expressed what is not definable, measurable or likely to be agreed upon.”

So where do we stand on this question today? Colin Baker summarized his answers to my emails with, “I suppose the real answer is: we do not know ….” In addition, because his figure included language learners, it overestimated active bilinguals by including potential bilinguals. Given all of this, I think that I will continue to state that probably more than half of the world’s population is bilingual, and hope that one day we will be able to have a more precise figure.