Bilingual

Life and Reality

François Grosjean

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780674066137, 9780674048874
• eBook ISBN: 9780674056459
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Whether in family life, social interactions, or business negotiations, half the people in the world speak more than one language every day. Yet many myths persist about bilingualism and bilinguals. In a lively and entertaining book, an international authority on bilingualism explores the many facets of life with two or more languages.

I

Bilingual Adults

1

Why Are People Bilingual?

Out of curiosity, I googled the word “bilingual” and came up with more than 32 million hits (a number that will have increased by the time you read this). I then looked up the ways the word was used and found it in the contexts of bilingual dictionaries, bilingual professions, bilingual people, bilingual laws, bilingual nations, bilingual books, bilingual toys, bilingual studies, bilingual ballots, bilingual databases, bilingual schools, and so on. As I went through the list (I gave up after a few pages), it became clear that the word “bilingual” was being used in many different ways, such as, “who know and use two languages” (in reference to bilingual people), “which are presented in two languages” (bilingual books, ballots), “which need two languages” (bilingual professions), “which recognize two languages” (bilingual nations), or “which go from one language to the other” (bilingual dictionaries). It also emerged that some expressions are not clear. Is a bilingual school, for example, a school that welcomes and caters to two monolingual language populations, a school that uses two languages in its teaching, or a school that promotes bilingualism in its children? The take-home message from this is that we must be careful in interpreting the word “bilingual” when we see it or hear it.

In this book matters will be simpler, as we will be concentrating on bilingual adults and bilingual children. In addition, I propose this definition of bilinguals at the outset:

Bilinguals are those who use two or more languages (or dialects) in their everyday lives.

Three points need to be made with regard to this definition. First, it puts the emphasis on the regular use of languages and not on fluency, as I shall discuss in more detail in Chapter 2. Second, it includes dialects along with languages. Thus, an Italian who uses one of Italy’s many dialects, such as Pugliese, as well as Italian is considered to be bilingual, just as a person who uses English and Spanish on a regular basis is. Third, the definition includes two or more languages, since some people use three or four languages, if not more.

I have often been asked why I don’t use the word “multilingual.” Two reasons come to mind. The first is that some people are “only” bilingual (they know and use two languages) and it seems odd to use the term “multilingual” when describing them. The second is that the word “multilingual” is used less than “bilingual” in reference to individuals. There is a long tradition in the field of extending the notion of bilingualism to those who use two or more languages on a regular basis.

Before spending several chapters examining the bilingual person, we need to ask ourselves why people are bilingual and why it is that so many inhabitants of the world use two or more languages in their everyday life. In this chapter we will look first at the factors that lead to bilingualism, and second at how extensive bilingualism really is.

Reasons That Lead to Bilingualism

If you attempt to find out the number of languages there are in the world, you will come up with many different answers. A primary reason for this is how you define a language as compared with a variety of a language, often called a dialect. When you include each dialect as an independent language, the count goes up; when you don’t, the number goes down. The Web site and reference book Ethnologue: Languages of the World presents a comprehensive catalogue of all the known living languages in the world today. It basically applies the criteria of mutual intelligibility between dialects and a common literature to determine whether two dialects are part of the same language, but it also allows for exceptions based on ethnolinguistic identities. According to the latest count by Ethnologue, close to 7,000 languages exist in the world (the exact number in the 2005 edition is 6,912 languages). The area with the fewest languages is Europe (only 239 languages) and the area with the most languages is Asia (2,269). One outstanding area, which we all tend to see as vast but devoid of important land masses—and hence of languages—is the Pacific, but in fact as many as 1,310 languages are spoken on the various islands scattered across the great expanse of the Pacific Ocean.¹

With so many languages in the world (even though, according to Ethnologue, some 516 of them are nearly extinct), a lot of contact is bound to take place between people of different language groups. And with such language contact, bilingualism will arise. Members of one group will learn the language of another—just as, for instance, Swiss Germans learn French, or immigrants to the United States learn English. Sometimes the learning is reciprocal, although this is rare. Other times, interacting groups will learn a lingua franca (a language of communication), such as Swahili, which is used for between-group interaction in Eastern Africa.

Let us now look more closely at the reasons for language contact and bilingualism.

Linguistic Makeup of a Country

A rather rough way of assessing the amount of language contact that takes place in each country is to divide the number of languages in the world (some 7,000) by the number of countries (192, according to the United Nations at the time of writing). The result, an average of 36 languages per country, gives us some idea of the extent of linguistic diversity. According to linguist William Mackey, however, this figure requires a few correctives. First, Mackey points out, some languages are numerically more significant than others. Ethnologue estimates that 94 percent of the world’s people speak 347 languages, or approximately 5 percent of all the languages. Among the languages spoken by the most people we find Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English, Bengali, Hindi/Urdu, Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, and French. Second, some languages are spoken natively in several countries (for example, Spanish is spoken throughout Central and South America, English in many Commonwealth countries). That said, many countries are home to numerous languages: there are some 516 languages in Nigeria, according to Ethnologue, 427 in India, 275 in Australia, 200 in Brazil, 280 in Cameroon, and so on. In fact, it is difficult to find countries with only one or two languages; they are usually isolated geographically (islands such as Greenland and Saint Helena) or politically (North Korea, Cuba).²

Linguistic contact within a country, and hence bilingualism, will depend on many factors. One is language distribution within the country. If the distribution is geographically based—that is, if the various languages are found in specific areas—there may be less contact than if the language groups all occupy the same territory. One example with which I am very familiar is Switzerland, where the linguistic borders between the four national languages are relatively well delineated: French is spoken in the west, Italian basically in the Ticino area (central southern tip of the country), Romansh in a small area in the eastern part of the country, and German in the rest of the territory. Invariably bilingualism occurs all along the linguistic borders (I live some three miles from the French-German border) and also in border towns like Fribourg and Biel/Bienne. In other countries, two or more languages occupy the same territory (for instance, English and Spanish in the American Southwest), and in such cases the chances of bilingualism are greater, all other things being equal, since much more contact takes place between groups.

Another factor is the language policy of the country. If a government recognizes several languages and gives them some official status (as Canada does with English and French, and Belgium with French, Flemish, and German), then the language contact may not be as great as in countries that recognize one official language among the many that are spoken. In the case of Belgium, for example, some contact occurs between the indigenous language groups and each group learns the language of the others in school, but many people lead their lives in basically one language. In contrast, when a country has just one national language (recognized or not), or an accepted lingua franca, as in many African nations, then members of most language groups have to become bilingual (examples would be the Inuit in Canada, the Navajo in the United States, the Kabyles in Algeria, the Albanians in Greece, the Hungarians in Romania, the Finns in Sweden, and so forth). Of course, other factors will have some influence, such as the linguistic and education policies of a country and the attitudes vis-à-vis different language groups. A Belgian offers this assessment of the linguistic situation in his country:

Every child at school learns both languages starting in early primary school. Flemish-speaking people . . . learn and know French much better, because French is a much more useful and international language.³

Movement of Peoples

In today’s world, in addition to language contact between indigenous groups, contact occurs between the indigenous groups and speakers of other languages who have immigrated to that region or country. Several patterns may lead to bilingualism. Most frequently, at least nowadays, the immigrants (to the United States, England, or France, for instance) learn the language of their new homeland, but the indigenous population may also learn the language of the settlers (thus, historically we find American Indians learning English in the United States, and Egyptians learning Arabic during the Arab settlement of Egypt). In some cases, but rarely, each group learns the language of the other (as when Spanish settlers in Paraguay learned Guaraní and Guaraní Indians learned Spanish).

People have always moved within and across countries and continents and have done so for many different reasons. Trade, commerce, and business have long given rise to language contact and hence bilingualism. In earlier times, when traders traveled to areas where another language was spoken or a lingua franca was used, many—buyers as well as sellers—became bilingual. Greek was the lingua franca of trade in the Mediterranean during the third, fourth, and fifth centuries bce. Today, Russian is the language of trade and business throughout Russia and the nations of the former Soviet Union (more than a hundred languages are spoken in the Russian Federation), and of course English is a major language of trade and business throughout the world. Business today increasingly operates on global dimensions. Many people move to another country for a few years to work for an international division of their company; their families often accompany them, and both adults and children may become bilingual. And we should note here that it is not always necessary for people to migrate physically for language contact to take place. A great many businesspeople communicate with each other by phone and online, in English and other international languages, across countries and time zones, and then return to their normal, often monolingual, lives at the end of the workday.

People also move around the world for political and religious reasons. World history is full of examples of people moving to another land and, more often than not, another language, for political reasons: Russians migrated after the 1917 Revolution, Sudeten Germans after World War II, Cubans during the Castro era, Vietnamese after the fall of South Vietnam. As for religious migrations, Huguenot Protestants fled France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and settled in Russia, England, Holland, and America, for example. In the twentieth century Russian Jews left the Soviet Union under difficult circumstances and settled in Israel or the United States, among other countries. And in recent years, many Christians have been leaving the Middle East and resettling elsewhere.

Even though military invasions, wars, and colonization are probably less frequent today than in the past, they have been the cause of much language contact. Alexander the Great and his armies spread Greek throughout the Middle East; the Roman Empire brought Latin to much of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East; the Spanish conquistadores in the Americas spread their language; colonizations in the nineteenth century increased the number of speakers of French, English, and Russian, and so on.

Finally, migration for economic and social reasons is a major factor in the movement of peoples and hence of language contact. People have always moved to other regions, countries, or continents in search of work and better living conditions. Many countries throughout the world have a history of immigration, and many, such as Australia, Canada, the United States, Brazil, and Argentina, have been built on this very phenomenon. Western Europe, which many left in earlier centuries for better conditions elsewhere, has now, in turn, become home to large immigrant communities that are in various stages of integration.

Within the first few generations of immigration, there is a great deal of language contact as immigrants and their descendants continue to speak their native language and also, most of the time, the language(s) of their new country. It has been estimated, for example, that owing to immigration, some 300 different languages are spoken in London today, and that even a small market town like Boston in Lincolnshire, England, with a population of 70,000, houses some 65 spoken languages.⁴

Education and Culture

Education and culture have always been and will always be domains in which outside languages are learned and used. As far back as the time of the Roman Empire, almost all educated Romans learned Greek, which was the language of medicine, rhetoric, philosophy, and so on. Later in Europe, Italian and then French took on the same role, as did German for scientific domains in the nineteenth century. Today, English has taken over as the main lingua franca of education and culture. In addition, millions of children and students, in many different countries, not only learn one or two languages as subjects in school but are also educated in a language that is not their native language. This is the case, for example, in numerous African and Asian nations as well as in most immigration countries. A Marathi-Hindi-English trilingual writes:

When I first went to school I did not know English, but I started English as a subject in secondary school, and then English was the medium of instruction at college.⁵

A Farsi-English bilingual says:

I did not know how to speak English until I was ten years old, when I went to an English-speaking school in Tehran.⁶

Some schoolchildren and older students may actually travel some distance to be schooled or to go to college in a different language. An example close to my home is seen in the French border area where I live in Switzerland. There is a long-established tradition among Swiss German students of crossing the linguistic border to attend our local French-speaking high school instead of going to their own German-speaking high school. We often hear the students chatting away in Swiss German as they walk from the train station, and by the end of their schooling they have become German-French bilinguals. As for college, one need only think of all the students who travel to France, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere, to obtain a degree. These students become active bilinguals very quickly.

Other Factors

Among other factors leading to bilingualism, three come to mind: bilingual families, people’s professions, and deafness. Concerning the first, there are innumerable bilingual households in which the children learn the home language (or home languages) as well as the language(s) outside the home. We will come back to this in Part 2 of this book, but this is a very common way of becoming bilingual. Here is the testimony of one English-Spanish bilingual:

I was born and grew up in Colombia, South America. In the type...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1. Bilingual Adults
• Part 2. Bilingual Children
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index