watching Dr. Kim Potowski, Associate Professor of Hispanic linguistics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, give her TEDx talk, “No child left monolingual” (Potowski 2013), I heard her say, “Now the fact is that 65% of the world today is bilingual or multilingual….” I was intrigued by this sudden jump in numbers and so I wrote to Dr. Potowski to ask her what the source was for her figure. She kindly replied that she had found it in a book published in 2002 which I immediately consulted, but I had no success finding the figure. I left it at that although her number seemed really high to me.
More than a year later, it was a pleasant surprise to hear from Dr. Potowski again who told me that she had finally found the source. The figure had been given by Colin Baker and his colleague, Sylvia Prys Jones, both of Bangor University in Wales, in the Preface to their monumental The Encyclopedia of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education (1998). In it, they state, “… around two-thirds of the world’s population are bilingual.”
So the next stage in my quest was to write to Colin Baker to ask him where they had obtained that figure, or how they had worked it out. Over several exchanges of emails, he explained to me how they had guesstimated the figure. They put together a rough spreadsheet with estimates of each country’s bilingual population. They used Ethnologue, THE source about languages in the world today, to which they added several other sources. At the time, the language sources were incomplete (e.g., on the bilingual language minorities in China and in other large countries) or, quite simply, the data was inaccurate.
Colin Baker continued, “My memory is that we estimated that the ‘true’ value was probably between 50% and 70% if we were rather generous in our definition of a ‘bilingual’. Under 50% seemed too small and above 70% rather unlikely. While 60% would have been a midpoint, it would have been spurious and dishonest to suggest we could be that accurate. Hence ‘two thirds’ became a less spurious way of giving our generous guess.”
I asked Colin Baker if they had taken the mean of percentages worked out for each country, in essence giving each country the same weight even if the populations are of different sizes, or if they had taken the total estimated number of bilinguals, across all countries, divided by the world’s population at the time. He replied that they had used the latter approach but that they had to exclude some countries from the total for sheer lack of data.
Colin Baker added an important remark to this. They had included those learning a second language, particularly English, which adds literally millions of people to the numerator. Based on this, and on the fact that at the time the numerical bilingual data was so poor, he now thinks that it would have been wiser to give upper and lower boundaries for the guesstimate, that is, between 50% and 70%, “… as this would have better expressed what is not definable, measurable or likely to be agreed upon.”
So where do we stand on this question today? Colin Baker summarized his answers to my emails with, “I suppose the real answer is: we do not know ….” In addition, because his figure included language learners, it overestimated active bilinguals by including potential bilinguals. Given all of this, I think that I will continue to state that probably more than half of the world’s population is bilingual, and hope that one day we will be able to have a more precise figure.
But will that hope ever materialize? Let’s give Colin Baker the last word and imagine a British gleam in his eyes as he says it: “And to add to the fun – perhaps the question about the percentage of the world’s population who are more than bilingual (multilingual) could be posed. I’d not even offer a guess on that one!”
References
1 Baker, Colin, and Sylvia Prys Jones. 1998. Encyclopedia of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
2 Batalova, Jeanne, and Elijah Alperi. 2018. “Immigrants in the U.S. states with the fastest-growing foreign-born populations.” Migration Policy Institute. https://www.migrationpolicy.org.
3 Christopher, Anthony J. 2011. “Questions of languages in the Commonwealth censuses.” Population, Space and Place, 17: 534–549.
4 Eberhard, David M., Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig, eds. 2020. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 23rd edn. Dallas, TX: SIL International. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com.
5 Grosjean, François. 2012. “Langues: la statistique se fourvoie.” Le Temps, September 11. https://www.letemps.ch/opinions/langues-statistique-se-fourvoie.
6 Grosjean, François. 2013. “L’OFS rectifie: près de la moitié des Suisses sont bilingues.” Le Temps, June 3. https://www.letemps.ch/opinions/lofs-rectifie-pres-moitie-suisses-bilingues.
7 Grosjean, François. 2014. “Chasing down those 65%.” Life as bilingual blog. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/life-bilingual/201411/chasing-down-those-65.
8 Mackey, Wiliam F. 1967. Bilingualism as a World Problem. Montreal, Canada: Harvest House.
9 Potowski, Kim. 2013. “No child left monolingual.” TEDx talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSs1uCnLbaQ.
10 Schott, Esther, Lena V. Kremin, and Krista Byers-Heinlein. 2019. “Child bi- and multilingualism in the home in Canada: Rates and language pairs.” Poster presented at the International Symposium on Bilingualism, Edmonton, Canada, June 23–28, 2019.
11 Sebba, Mark. 2017. “Awkward questions: Language issues in the 2011 census in England.” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 181–193. DOI: 10.1080/01434632.2017.1342651.
12 Siegel, Paul, Elizabeth Martin, and Rosalind Bruno. 2001. Language Use and Linguistic Isolation: Historical Data and Methodological Issues. Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau.
13 TNS Opinion & Social. 2012. “Europeans and their languages.” Special Eurobarometer 386. European Commission. https://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion/archives/ebs/ebs_386_en.pdf.
14 Zeigler, Karen, and Steven A. Camarota. 2019. “67.3 million in the United States spoke a foreign language at home in 2018.” Center for Immigration Studies, October 2019.
Notes
1 1 https://www.ethnologue.com/country/17-93.
2 2 https://www.ethnologue.com/country/17-92.
3 3 https://www.ethnologue.com/country/17-10.
4 4 Migrants in the UK: An overview. 4 October 2019. The Migration Observatory. https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/migrants-in-the-uk-an-overview.
5 5 SWI Swissinfo.ch. Immigration to Switzerland continues to rise. Feb 15, 2019. https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/foreigners-_immigration-to-switzerland-continues-to-rise/44758558.