Bilingualism

Language Policy in Multilingual Educational Contexts

S. Romaine, in Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics (Second Edition), 2006

Global Distribution of Multilingualism

Bilingualism and multilingualism are a normal and unremarkable necessity of everyday life for the majority of the world's population. Linguists estimate that there are roughly 6800 languages in the world, but only about 200 nation-states. With more than 30 times as many languages as there are countries, bilingualism or multilingualism is present in practically every country in the world, whether it is officially recognized or not (Romaine, 1995). This means that in a broad sense multilingual educational contexts can be understood to encompass the educational practices of most countries in the world. The varied cultural and linguistic contexts existing in contemporary societies around the globe pose complex challenges for policy makers in many areas. The centrality of language to education means that policies concerning choice of which language(s) to use as the medium of instruction are essential, even if the need is not always overtly acknowledged. In addition, the need for teaching of additional languages as subjects is widely recognized as schools have a critical role to play in providing the bi- and multilingual skills that have become increasingly necessary in the modern world. In this article the terms ‘bilingualism’ and ‘multilingualism’ will be used interchangeably to refer to the routine use of two or more languages in a community (see Bilingualism).
Despite the near-universal presence of more than one language in every country, the global distribution of linguistic diversity is strikingly uneven. Papua New Guinea alone contains 13.2% of the world's languages, but only 0.1% of the world's population and 0.4% of the world's land area. The overall ratio of languages to people is only about 1 to 5000. If this ratio were repeated in the United States, there would be 50 000 languages spoken there (Nettle and Romaine, 2000). Over 70% of all the world's languages are found in just 20 nation-states, among them some of the poorest countries in the world. They include Papua New Guinea (823), Indonesia (726), Nigeria (505), India (387), Mexico (295), Cameroon (279), Australia (235), the Democratic Republic of Congo (218), Brazil (192), United States (175), the Philippines (169), Malaysia (139), Tanzania (135), Vanuatu (109), Russia (100), Vietnam (93), Laos (82), Ivory Coast (77), Ghana (79), and Solomon Islands (69). These data come from the Ethnologue, a database compiled by SIL International.