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Are most people monolingual? | ||
Tags: Monolingual | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4409 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 1 of 25 13 October 2013 at 1:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think it's fair to say that people who grow up in English-speaking countries tend not to learn other languages.
Native English speakers sometimes get a hard time about this. We all know the stereotype of the American tourist who assumes the entire population of the world speaks English. But is multi-lingualism really as common a some folks would have you believe? There are well over a billion people in China, most of whom I reckon would be pretty much monolingual. Yes, there is an emerging group of well-educated young people who study languages but they must be a tiny minority of the overall population. The Indian subcontinent also tops the billion mark and although English is the official language, how many peope actually speak it with any real confidence? Of course, it's possible that a lot of people know more than one indigenous tongue, I'm not sure about this. But I assume there will be hundreds of millions of monoglots. By "monolingual" I mean peope who can only really function in one language. I'm not counting those who learned language X at school and can merely trot out a few phrases. Virtually the entire continent of South America is reliant on one local language. Other major population centres are the Arab world, Russia, East Asia....there must be a huge number of monoglots among them. Perhaps Africa saves the day for the linguists. Almost the entire region was colonised and the enforced European languages seem to exist side by side with the traditional ones. Edited by beano on 13 October 2013 at 1:54pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| akkadboy Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5195 days ago 264 posts - 497 votes Speaks: French*, English, Yiddish Studies: Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Welsh | Message 2 of 25 13 October 2013 at 2:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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Just some thoughts (if I can I will check and come back with stats for China) :
- a large number of Chinese citizens do not have Mandarin as their native language yet know it well enough - do you count MSA/Arabic dialects as two different languages ? - Hindi is the lingua franca in north India at least but I think it is not as much widespread as a native language Edited by akkadboy on 13 October 2013 at 2:08pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| akkadboy Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5195 days ago 264 posts - 497 votes Speaks: French*, English, Yiddish Studies: Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Welsh | Message 3 of 25 13 October 2013 at 2:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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Here are some numbers :
- 400 millions Chinese do not have Mandarin as their native language - 60% of Indians do not have Hindi as their native language Sure, this says nothing about the extent to which these 400 m./60% have any knowledge of Mandarin/Hindi or another language, so not all of them might be bilingual. - 17,5% of the Canadian population are bilingual - 80% in the USA report having English as their native language, yet 95% report speaking it well So, what can be done with this ? I think I agree with you that the idea that "most people in the world are at least bilingual"/"monolingualism is not the norm" might be overblowned but I would be cautious on treating the Arabic world, China and India as largely monolingual. Edited by akkadboy on 13 October 2013 at 2:32pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Oheao Diglot Newbie Canada Joined 3955 days ago 31 posts - 33 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Mandarin, Greek | Message 4 of 25 13 October 2013 at 5:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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There are hundreds of millions of Chinese who can speak their native language, and
Mandarin. Also, in India many people are multilingual. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5178 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 5 of 25 13 October 2013 at 6:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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From what I know about India it seems very multilingual. Indonesia has a very large
population at over 200 million and they have local languages and an official language. Quite a few Southeast Asian countries have English as a working language so many of them are bilingual (or more). Throughout the Middle East there are many multinational countries which would have more than one language in addition to colonial legacies which have left behind English or French. Among former Soviet states, many people would speak Russian in addition to their local language and I have found that people who speak other languages in the Turkic family besides Turkish tend to know Turkish as well. As you stated, Africa is very multilingual. Depending on where you go in Europe, people can be quite multilingual. Also, depending on where you go in Central and South America, there are strong communities of people who speak indigenous languages such as Quechua. And everyone likes to harp on the US for being mostly monoglot but many people forget about its diversity. Depending on the state you're in, a fairly large portion of the population may be bilingual in Spanish or Chinese (or many other languages) and English. Of course, you can certainly go other places in the US and find a stereotypical monoglot population. So due to history and political geography I'd say that multilingualism is the norm for a very large portion of the world's population. But monoglots aren't to be faulted for laziness or ignorance as most multilingual people are so due to necessity - such as by speaking a minority or immigrant language at home and learning the official language in school (as in being taught in the language, not simply having a language class an hour a day or a few times a week), living in close quarters with other language groups in a multilingual state, and by having "forced" access to media of a different language (such as non-dubbed TV in English). 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4559 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 6 of 25 13 October 2013 at 6:28pm | IP Logged | ||
Wikipedia's page on Multilingualism states that "[m]ultilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population" and links to this site. While the share of multilinguals in the Earth's population isn't the subject of that digest, it does give some relevant bits of information, like this:
These parts of the world probably include South-East Asia, parts of India, the Caucasus and Sub-Saharan Africa. Your description of the situation in Africa only describes a small part of the picture: if you look at Wikipedia's list of lingua francas it lists a dozen languages in Africa that weren't the administrative language of the major colonial powers and yet are still used for inter-ethnic and inter-tribal communication, so it's not like the Europeans introduced the Africans to multilingualism. 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4475 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 7 of 25 13 October 2013 at 6:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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Mentioning the Chinese/Arabic situation also hints at the somewhat slippery nature of this analysis. In situations where there exists a standardized version of a language, it is usually the case that colloquial differences exist, and that they may be related to geographical factors. The only question is just how far apart is the regional vernacular from the standard. In the case of Arabic and Chinese, perhaps fairly far. Maybe a bit less so for German (except Bavarian, maybe) and Italian, but still pretty far.
But even in English, there a numerous regional variations, and just about every native speaker who speaks the standardized version speaks differently in collquial situations. In some cases this may be reflected in slight or drastic changes in accent, increased use of contractions and sounds dropping, use of a different grammatical and/or vocabulary "register," etc. The differences often are slight enough that they aren't really recognized, at least by natives, as being distinct language forms, but in some cases they may be sufficient to impede mutual intelligibility, even for natives. I would say that someone who speaks Bavarian and Standard German speaks two languages, as does a speaker of Sicilian and Standard Italian. Does a speaker of Cockney English and "BBC News" English qualify? How about someone who speaks a distinctive Boston English among friends but can speak like a midwestern news broadcaster, too? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6369 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 8 of 25 13 October 2013 at 6:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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Amongst urban well-educated people, monolingualism is probably pretty rare outside of the Anglosphere. But there
are still a lot of poor and/or rural people who don't travel, don't have access to international media and so on. They are likely monolingual, except in places with a large linguistic diversity, like Malaysia or Nigeria. I suspect any statement about how common monolingualism is is mostly a statement about money and education. And comparing a monolingual American with a monolingual Swede is just silly. English is the global language, and learning other languages is a matter of interest for most, and necessity for very few. Whereas learning English is a must in pretty much every country except North Korea if you want to work your way up the social ladder. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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