It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. It has been noted by several that the home bias is a core weakness to the census data.Frontage of the Constitutional Court of South Africa written in South Africa's 11 official languages. ĮDIT: Check out this Wolfram Alpha-generated overview of the spread of languages spoken in the USA at home. At the very least, we can’t say for sure - not in any language. The averageĪmerican may be no more monolingual or less multilingual than any other average personĮlsewhere on the planet. Multilinguals may outnumber monolinguals, but it’s not clear by how much. To conclude that the average person is bilingual. Piecing together the available data for the rest of the world as best he could, heĮstimated that 80 percent of people on the planet speak 1.69 languages - not high enough The average number of languages spoken either natively or non-natively per person isġ.58. Parkvall calculated (in a study not yet published), Percent of the world’s 190-odd countries, and less than one-third of the world’s The reliable numbers that do exist cover only 15 Recently, the Stockholm University linguist Mikael Parkvall sought out data on globalīilingualism and ran into problems. With these facts and the phrasing of the question "more likely", the answer nudges to "Yes, Americans are more monolingual", but Michael Erard writing for the NYT in 2012 believes that it's still a toss up. Americans have less incentive/need to learn another language because English is the current global language of trade/commerce (as Greek and Latin have been in the past). Asia as a general rule is pointed to as a place where multilingualism is a daily fact.
#Monolingual country definition drivers
In this piece, he also discusses the drivers and influencing factors in bilingualism. Population is bi- or multilingual (less than the 20 percent found for the U.S.) when, inįact, most Swiss people know several languages that they use frequently. The outcome was that Swiss Statistics stated that a mere 15.8 percent of the Swiss In short, this is because of the way questions are phrased (specifically related to German vs. World over for the bi- or multilingualism of its inhabitants. In the United States than in Switzerland, even though the latter country is known the
In this instance, it would appear that there are proportionally more bilinguals In Switzerland-and show how quite official data can sometimes produce very surprising I will present two examples of national censuses-the one in the United States and the one Based on statistics from the European Commission and the US Census, there is clearly a big gap, although there is also a distinction between speaking a language at home and having the skills to speak another language.įrançois Grosjean, Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of psycholinguistics at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, reflects also on the challenge of counting bilinguals, including the definition. and Anthony Shook compare US to EU bilingualism as part of a neurological study and created the graph comparison above. That said, here are some points of reflection for those who want to explore the question from different angles. So the only honest answer, unfortunately, is we don't know for sure. There are no reliable statistics to answer the question. What does it mean to be multilingual/monolingual? How do you measure populations? Where does the data come from? Who is being compared in a "more likely" scenario? American to another Westerner, or to an average global citizen? To be able to answer the question, a baseline measurement needs to be established.
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