Multilingualism in the world

[Anthea Fraser Gupta]

Any such statistics can only be based on intelligent guesses. The
information is predicated on:

1) definitiion of language vs dialect (e.g. Cantonese/Mandarin Chinese;
Hindi/Urdu etc.)

2) definition of 'bilingual' (what level of knowledge is threshold?)

3) statistics on who knows what language (available for practically
nowhere except Canada).

Your student could have happy hours looking at government requirements
for state education and comapre them to school leaving results. Or
interviewing a sample of people from various countries.

With a fairly liberal definition of (1) ('if people can't have a decent
conversation face to face, OR if they call them different languages, let
them be different languages') and a middle of the road definition of (2)
('if you can hold a simple conversation about name, family members, and
get something to eat, you can speak a language') then my intelligent
guess is that there are fewer monolinguals.

Grounds? Big countries (e.g. Nigeria, China, India, Pakistan) where
there are not many monolinguals. Lots of other countries with few
monolinguals. Lots of migration.

By the way, do more people in the world drive on the left or on the
right? Another arguable question!

Anthea
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Anthea Fraser Gupta (Dr)

School of English, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT
<www.leeds.ac.uk/english/staff/afg>

NB: Reply to a.f.gupta at leeds.ac.uk

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-----Original Message-----
From: owner-lgpolicy-list at ccat.sas.upenn.edu
[mailto:owner-lgpolicy-list at ccat.sas.upenn.edu] On Behalf Of
rbhatt at uiuc.edu
Sent: 15 April 2008 03:03
To: lgpolicy-list at ccat.sas.upenn.edu
Subject: Multilingualism in the world

Dear List members,

Are there any statistics, or some raw numbers, to show that the world is
(people in it are) indeed more multilingual than monolingual?  I am
quite aware of the definitional isues surrounding the terms
mono-/multi-lingualism, but I need a non-nuanced answer/data to fully
answer a question raised by one of my freshman undergrad student in my
language in globalization class.

Many thanks,
Rakesh
***********************************
Associate Professor of Linguistics and SLATE Department of Linguistics
University of Illinois 4080 FLB, 707 S. Mathews Ave Urbana, IL 61801
U.S.A.

Ph: 217-265-6308
Fax: 217-244-8430

http://www.linguistics.uiuc.edu/rbhatt/