The Mysteries of Bilingualism. Francois Grosjean
which often grouped together a national language and a dialect such as “German or Swiss German.”
As I stated in an article at the time (Grosjean 2012), the people who thought of the question clearly had a very restrictive view of bilingualism. It was assumed that people have one main language and that if they have another main language, then they must know it very well. In addition, it was stipulated that one must think in each of one’s languages to be able to list them. The fact that thinking can take place independently of language and can be visual-spatial, or involve non-linguistic concepts, was not taken into account. Also, speakers of both Swiss German and German, among others, were given just one language category to check and hence could not list their two languages. And yet, the majority of Swiss Germans (close to two-thirds of Swiss people) use both Swiss German and German in their everyday lives and are de facto bilingual.
The outcome was that Swiss Statistics stated that a mere 15.8% of the Swiss population was bi- or multilingual. This was less than the percentages found in largely monolingual countries such as the United States and France (around 20% of bilinguals at the time). And yet, any visitor to Switzerland will have noticed how extensive bi- and multilingualism is in the country with people often using two or more languages in their everyday lives, and knowing at least one other learned in school. In the next part, we will see how the other questions in the Swiss Census allowed us to estimate a truer percentage of bilinguals.
In sum, finding out how many bilinguals there are in a country is particularly difficult. Some countries do not have language questions, others do but they are few in number and the results have little to say about bilingualism, and others still have enough questions but the data is not analyzed adequately so as to get at the extent of bilingualism in the country.
The Proportion of Bilinguals in a Number of Countries
In this part, we report on the state of bilingualism of the inhabitants of a number of countries. National censuses, or large language surveys, offer data from which estimates of bilingualism can be worked out based either on language use, or language knowledge (potential bilinguals are also included here), or both.
The United States
I have always been fascinated by the state of bilingualism in the United States maybe because I lived there for many years and one of its eminent scholars, Einar Haugen, himself a Norwegian-English bilingual, became a close colleague and friend. As stated above, the US Census Bureau does not keep track of bilingualism as such, but ever since 1980, and annually since 2000 with the American Community Survey (ACS), three language questions are asked (see the preceding part), and they allow us to work out, to a large extent, who is bilingual and where bilinguals are situated.
The 2018 ACS found that 67.3 million inhabitants (native-born, legal immigrants, and illegal immigrants) spoke a language other than English at home (Zeigler and Camarota 2019). Among those people, some 63 million also knew and used English and hence were bilingual. This represents 20.55% of the population. If we add to this number bilingual children under 5 (not covered by the survey) as well as people who use a second or third language in their everyday lives but only English at home, then probably close to 23% of the population can be considered bilingual.
The percentage of bilinguals is definitely on the rise. Researcher Jeffrey Bloem at the University of Minnesota helped me extract the appropriate numbers from the census and ACS databases. For each year, we tabulated those who spoke a language other than English, as well as English to varying degrees, and we worked out a percentage based on the total population. The results are plotted in Figure 2.1.
Figure 2.1 The percentage of bilinguals, and of inhabitants who know no English, since 1980 in the United States.
As can be seen in the graph (dark grey function), there is a steady increase of the percentage of bilinguals between 1980 and 2018. Back in 1980, the percentage of bilinguals was 10.68% whereas in 2018, the last ACS survey for which we have data, it was 20.55%. Thus the percentage has practically doubled in 38 years. One will want to study the reasons for this constant rise since 1980. There is, of course, the arrival of new immigrants who learn English and hence become bilingual. Some maintain their languages from generation to generation and hence bilingualism continues. Other reasons may be the (re)learning of some older immigration languages, as well as of Native American languages, and of American Sign language. To these should be added the effort that is being made to allow children and adolescents to acquire and use a second language in the home, as well as more natural language learning opportunities in some schools with immersion and dual language programs.
Some might say that the increasing number of bilinguals goes hand in hand with an increase of inhabitants who know no English. The results of those who report that they do not know any English is plotted in the same graph (Figure 2.1; light grey function) and, as can be seen, the percentages remain very low throughout all these years. English is so important in the United States that close to 98.7% of the population know it, and use it in everyday life, according to the ACS results. The position of prominence that English has in the US is in no danger, but some room is now being made for other languages.
Bilingualism in the US is very diverse. English-Spanish bilinguals represent 61% of all bilinguals and hence Spanish is definitely America’s second language (41,460,427 speakers in 2018). Other important languages, but to a far lesser extent, are Chinese (3,471,604), Tagalog (1,760,468), Vietnamese (1,542,473), Arabic (1,259,118), French (1,232,173) and Korean (1,086,335). Bilinguals are not equally distributed across the nation. Some states contain proportionally very few (e.g., West Virginia, Mississippi, Montana, Kentucky) whereas others have a far greater proportion (e.g., California, Texas, New Mexico, New Jersey, New York, etc.). As for cities, the ones with the most bilinguals are Los Angeles, Houston, New York, Phoenix and Chicago.
Bilingualism in the United States has traditionally been transitional – a passage, over one or two generations, from monolingualism in a minority language to monolingualism in English. However, there is an increasing awareness that the country’s knowledge of the languages of the world is a natural resource that should not be wasted. Hence a growing number of families are fostering bilingualism either by making sure the home’s minority language and culture are kept alive or by encouraging their children to acquire and use a second language.
Canada
As we saw in the preceding part, Canada obtains data both on language knowledge and language use in its censuses. Concerning language knowledge, it is a person’s ability to speak the language(s) well enough to conduct a conversation. For a child who has not yet learned to speak, this includes languages that the child is learning to speak at home.9 Two questions in the 2016 census get at language knowledge, and the combined results show that 39% of the population report being able to conduct a conversation in more than one language, of which 17.9% report that the languages involved are English and French. It is important to note that these percentages concern actual bilinguals but also potential bilinguals as some do not actually use two languages in their everyday life, even though they know a second language well enough to do so.
To get at actual bilingualism, that is, the regular use of two or more languages in everyday life, one has to look at the results of the languages spoken at home, on the one hand, and at work, on the other. Concerning the home,10 19.4% of the population report speaking more than one language at home (this is a rise from 17.5% in 2011). The languages involved can concern the two official languages, English and French, or one of these languages along with a non-official language (aboriginal language or immigrant language). People with a non-official mother tongue who use a language other than their mother tongue at home usually adopt English or French as their main language or as a secondary language. Only 28.0% of people with a mother tongue other than English or French speak only their mother tongue at home. By comparison, 94.3% of people with English as their mother tongue and 83.1% of people with French