Bilingual
A bilingual person has the ability to speak two languages fluently, either natively or by learning at some point later in life. Many people all over the world are bilingual, with one of the languages often being English. A multilingual person can speak more than two languages fluently. A trilingual person can speak three languages fluently.In a narrow sense, a bilingual is someone who was surrounded by both languages throughout their childhood, and speak both languages with equal proficiency, as if having two mother tongues. As such, examples of places or circumstances in which bilinguals are mostly found include:
- most regions of southern China: usually Cantonese Chinese (native) and Mandarin Chinese (learned, official)
- certain cantons of Switzerland
- Brussels, the bilingual capital of Belgium (15% Dutch-speaking)
- Finland (6% Finland-Swedish, Åland unilingually Swedish)
- the Quebec province in Canada (10% English-speaking)
- Spain, where many regions have more than one official language (specially in Catalonia, where Spanish and Catalan both enjoy great social esteem and are both used in almost every social situation)
- Ireland (4% Irish-speaking)
- some parts of Africa and India
- Wales, and to a lesser extent other Celtic-speaking regions of the UK
- Estonia (29% Russian-speaking)
- Immigrants and their descendants
- among children of ambassadors and expatriates
- border areas between two countries of mixed languages
- among children of mixed couples where the parents each speak a different language.
There are, obviously, more bilinguals using the second definition than there are using the first one.
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In the US, proponents of the practice argue that it should keep them from falling behind their peers in the interim between immigrating and mastering English. Opponents of the practice argue that it delays their mastery of English, thereby retarding their learning of other subjects as well. In California there has been considerable politicking for and against bilingual education in the State. Much of the argument against, hinges on the idea that California is in the United States and that everyone in the US needs to learn to speak English.
In Japan, the need of bilingualism, mostly Japanese and English has been pointed out, thus, there are some scholars who advocates to lecture children scientific topics such as mathematics in English rather than Japanese while other liberal courses such as History are taught in Japanese.
Bilingual education
Bilingual education is to teach children in school a language other than their native language. See also
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