bilingual only if you can converse fluently in a second language besides your mother tongue? Should you count languages in which you can converse clumsily? What about languages that you can read but not speak—e.g., Latin and classical Greek for those of us who learned those languages at school? And what about languages that you can’t speak, but that you can understand when spoken by others? American-born children of immigrant parents often can understand but not speak their parents’ language, and New Guineans often distinguish between languages that they can both speak and understand, and languages that they say that they can only “hear” but not speak. Partly because of this lack of agreement on a definition of bilingualism, we lack comparative data on the frequency of bilingualism around the world.
Nevertheless, we don’t have to throw up our hands in despair and ignore the subject, because there is much anecdotal information about bilingualism. Most native-born Americans with English-speaking parents are effectively monolingual for obvious reasons: in the United States there is little need, and for most Americans little regular opportunity, to speak a second language; most immigrants to the U.S. learn English; and most English-speaking Americans marry English-speaking spouses. Most European countries have only a single official national language, and most native-born Europeans with native-born parents learn only that national language as pre-school children. However, because European countries are all much smaller in area and (today) much less self-sufficient economically, politically, and culturally than is the United States, most educated Europeans now learn additional languages in school by formal instruction and often achieve fluency. Shop assistants in many Scandinavian department stores wear pins on their jackets showing the flags of the various languages in which they are competent to help foreign customers. Nevertheless, this widespread multilingualism in Europe is a recent phenomenon that has resulted from mass higher education, post–World War II economic and political integration, and the spread of English-language mass media. Formerly, monolingualism was widespread in European nation- states, as in other state societies. The reasons are clear: state speech communities are huge, often millions of speakers; state societies favor the state’s own language for use in government, education, commerce, the army, and entertainment; and (as I’ll discuss below) states have potent intentional and unintentional means of spreading their state language at the expense of other languages.
In contrast, multilingualism is widespread or routine in traditional small-scale non-state societies. The reasons are again simple. We have seen that traditional language communities are small (a few thousand speakers or less) and occupy small areas. Immediately neighboring communities often speak different languages. People regularly encounter and have to deal with speakers of other languages. To trade, to negotiate alliances and access to resources, and (for many traditional people) even to obtain a spouse and to communicate with that spouse requires being not merely bilingual but multilingual. Second and further languages are learned in childhood and in the home or socially, not through formal instruction. In my experience, fluency in five or more languages is the rule among traditional New Guineans. I shall now supplement those New Guinea impressions of mine with brief accounts from two continents: Aboriginal Australia and tropical South America.
Aboriginal Australia was occupied by about 250 different language groups, all of them subsisting by hunting-gathering, with an average of about a thousand speakers per language. All reliable reports describe most traditional Aboriginals as being at least bilingual, and most as knowing many languages. One such study was carried out by anthropologist Peter Sutton in the Cape Keerweer area of the Cape York Peninsula, where the local population of 683 people was divided into 21 clans, each with a different form of speech and averaging 33 people per clan. Those speech forms are classified into five languages plus about seven dialects, so that the average number of speakers is about 53 per speech form, or 140 per language. Traditional Aborigines in the area spoke or understood at least five different languages or dialects. In part because speech communities are so tiny, and in part because of a preference for linguistic exogamy (marrying someone whose primary language is not one’s own), 60% of marriages are between partners speaking different languages, another 16% are between speakers of different dialects of the same language, and only 24% are within the same dialect. That is despite the fact that neighboring clans tend to be linguistically similar, so that mere propinquity would lead to marriages being made within the same dialect if it were not for that preference for seeking geographically and linguistically more remote partners.
Because many social groups at Cape Keerweer involve speakers of different languages, conversations are often multilingual. It is customary to begin a conversation in the language or dialect of the person whom you are addressing, or (if you are a visitor) in the language of the host camp. You may then switch back to your own language, while your partners reply in their own languages, or you may address each person in his/her own language, your choice of language thereby indicating whom you are addressing at the moment. You may also switch languages depending on the implicit message that you wish to convey: e.g., one choice of language means “You and I have no quarrel,” another means “You and I do have a quarrel but I wish to cool it,” still another means “I am a good and socially proper person,” and yet another means “I will insult you by talking to you disrespectfully.” It is likely that such multilingualism was routine in our hunter-gatherer past, just as it still is today in traditional areas of New Guinea, and for the same underlying reasons: tiny speech communities, hence frequent linguistic exogamy, and daily encounters and conversations with speakers of other languages.
The other pair of studies, by Arthur Sorensen and Jean Jackson, is from the Vaupes River area on the border between Colombia and Brazil in the northwest Amazon Basin. About 10,000 Indians, speaking about 21 different languages of four different language families, are culturally similar in gaining their livelihood by farming, fishing, and hunting along rivers in tropical rainforests. Like Cape Keerweer Aborigines, Vaupes River Indians are linguistically exogamous but much more strictly so: in over a thousand marriages studied by Jackson, only one may possibly have been within a language group. While boys remain as adults in their parents’ longhouse in which they grew up, girls from other longhouses and language groups move to their husband’s longhouse at the time of marriage. A given longhouse contains women marrying in from several different language groups: three, in the case of a longhouse studied intensively by Sorensen. All children learn both their father’s and their mother’s languages already from infancy, then learn the languages of the other women of the longhouse. Hence everyone in the longhouse knows the four longhouse languages (that of the men, and those of the three language groups of the women), and most also learn some other languages from visitors.
Only after Vaupes River Indians have come to know a language well by hearing and passively acquiring vocabulary and pronunciation do they start speaking it. They carefully keep languages separate and work hard to pronounce each language correctly. They told Sorensen that it took them one or two years to learn a new language fluently. High value is placed on speaking correctly, and letting words from other languages creep into one’s conversation is considered shameful.
These anecdotes from small-scale societies on two continents and on New Guinea suggest that socially acquired multilingualism was routine in our past, and that the monolingualism or school-based multilingualism of modern state societies is a new phenomenon. But this generalization is only tentative and subject to limitations. Monolingualism may have characterized small-scale societies in some areas of low language diversity or recent language expansions, as at high latitudes or among the Inuit east of Alaska. The generalization remains based on anecdotes and on expectations derived from traditionally small language communities. Systematic surveys employing some standard definition of multilingualism are needed to place this conclusion on a firmer foot.
Benefits of bilingualism
Let’s now ask whether that traditional multilingualism or bilingualism brings net benefit, net harm, or neither to bilingual individuals compared with monolingual individuals. I’ll describe some fascinating and recently discovered practical advantages of bilingualism that may impress you more than the usual claim that learning a foreign language enriches your life. I’ll discuss here only the effects of bilingualism for individuals: I’ll defer to a later section the corresponding question about whether bilingualism is good or bad for a society as a whole.
Among modern industrial countries, bilingualism is a subject of debate especially in the United States, which has been incorporating a large fraction of non-English-speaking immigrants into its population for over 250 years. A frequently expressed view in the U.S. is that bilingualism is harmful, especially for children of immigrants, who are thereby hindered in negotiating the prevalently English-speaking culture of the U.S. and will be better off not learning their parents’ language. This view is widely held not only by native-born Americans but also by first- generation immigrant parents: e.g., by my grandparents and by my wife’s parents, who diligently avoided speaking together in Yiddish and Polish respectively in the presence of their children, in order to make sure that my parents
