Question:
I'm in the process of writing a paper for a college class about the
necessity of second-language education at the elementary school level,
and there's a chunk of data that I'm sure must be out there somewhere,
yet it continues to elude me...
I would like to know what percentage of the population of other
first-world countries can fluently speak more than one language, so I
can compare that the US's pitiful 14%.
If anyone out there in the internet land knows where this data might be
found, whether it be online, in a journal or book, or otherwise,
please let me know!
Answer:
If you find it, I'd find it interesting if you can summarize the
percentage of the population of these countries that fluently speak a
language other than the one used in their family that isn't (1) a
national language of their country, (2) a majority or substantial
minority language of their region of their country, (3) the mandated
language of eductaion, (4) a majority or national language of a
country within, say, 250 miles of their birth, (5) a historically
important language of their country, or (6) a regional or global
technical, artistic, commercial, legal, or scientific lingua franca.
I suspect that you'll find that most examples of bilingualism,
especially for bilinguals who learned in school as opposed to growing
up in bilingual households, fall into one or more of those categories.
For most of the US, the only language that would apply is English,
with exceptions in some locales for Spanish under 2 & 4, French under
4, and a few other very localized pockets of other class 2 languages.
(I grew up in Chicago, and Spanish was mandatory in elementary school,
although they didn't start until seventh grade.) If you factor out
the different pressures due to the six factors above, it wouldn't
surprise me if you found no significant difference between the US and
other countries.
I *think* there's some data on this in Crystal's _The Cambridge
Encyclopedia of Language_. John Edwards' _Multilingualism_ (1994)
seems to be cited a lot, but I haven't seen it, so I don't know if it
contains what you're looking for. Most of the books listed on Amazon
seem to deal more with the psycholinguistics and acquisition of
bilingualism rather than demographics
Submit Your
Own Answer!
