Bilingualism and diglossia

Viewed from the prism of the Anglo-Saxon world, monolingualism for many seems to be the normal state of affairs: we work, play, love, raise families, watch television, read introductory linguistics textbooks and do all the other things that human beings need or want to do through the medium of English, generally without giving a second thought to the language we use. The ‘languages’ menus on English language DVDs not infrequently offer only ‘English’, or ‘English for the deaf or hard of hearing’, as if no other languages were worth bothering about. This state of affairs is not, however, typical of all or even most societies across the globe: probably a majority of the world’s population needs to use more than one language on a regular basis.

An individual’s proficiency in two languages is known as bilingualism (likewise the terms trilingualism or multilingualism are used to denote a speaker’s competence in more than two languages). At the level of the nation state, again multilingualism rather than monolingualism is the norm, though the extent to which individuals within them control more than one language varies considerably. Within Europe, only Portugal and Iceland are generally reckoned to have no significant indigenous linguistic minorities (though, it all depends how one draws the distinction between ‘language’ and ‘dialect’). Switzerland has four official languages (French, Italian, German and Romansch); Belgium has three (Dutch, German and French), as does Finland, where Finnish, Swedish and Sami enjoy official status.