Talk:Bilingual

Doesn't this artcile talk about bilingual rather than bulingualism. -- Taku 21:49 Jan 13, 2003 (UTC)

Note that just speaking two languages fluently does not make one bilingual

Note that there's multiple definitions of bilingualism in the research literature: simultaneous bilingualism (in commonest case: 1 lang language learn from each parent) and sequential bilingualism (commonly first language learnt at home and second at school/work etc. environment), which is divided into early bilingualism (language learnt before puberty) and late bilingualism language learnt after puberty. Then there's also language dominancy effects, which might lead you to have an accent in your mother tongue, or the other way around. You may also be generally more skilled in a language that isn't your mother tongue. So it isn't that simple. GolDDranks (talk) 10:29, 8 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I do not agree with the above. It also contradicts with much of the rest of the article and three (1 English, 1 Australian, 1 American) of the five English dictionaries I have consulted say the opposite. Instead I included a narrow and a broader sense.

I agree that the page looks better now, but my dictionary of choice (http://m-w.com/) says that a bilingual is "able to use two languages especially with equal fluency" (my emphasis). I remember my English teacher noting to us in high school that even if our written English were syntactically indistinguishable from that of an average New Yorker or Londoner and even if we could speak English articulately with the eloquence of a native, we still shouldn't call ourselves "bilingual" because we started learning English in third grade. To be bilingual requiered "certain conditions", it's not simply a matter of proficiency.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jackie Chan, John Malkovich or Heidi Klum are not bilingual by my definition (but Michael Lonsdale, Jack Kerouac, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Linus Torvalds are). The article still stresses that there's an "more correct/more narrow" and a more popular (broader) version of the definiton, which is a distinction I feel is important to make. A bit like with "who" and "whom". Most English-speaking people rarely know of the difference nowadays, and since the "incorrect" variant of always using the former is so popular, it has become "correct".

A "narrow" sense and a "broader" sense is cool by me, but beware of excluding the first sense altogether... --Gabbe 16:42 Jan 14, 2003 (UTC)

I don't really get why John Malkovich is added to the group of not being bilingual. As far as I know he was born and raised in the USA. His family is of Croatian heritage but that doesn't say anything about the level of his language knowledge neither about his English (that has to be on native levels) nor about his Croation knowledge.

--valie 16:35, 15 Aug 2004 (UTC)

(John Malkovich speaks French fairly fluently, too)

I'd like to move this article to bilingual. bilingual gets 1,320,000 hits in google, where bilingualism gets only 103,000. Also, [[bilingual]]ism is easier to type than [[bilingualism|bilingual]] Martin

The move sounds like a good idea. Wesley

I propose the moves multilingual -> polyglot (title is better in line with the actual content of the article) and bilingual -> multilingual (speaking of not-necessarily-perfect fluency in several languages, "2" plays no special role; many "bilingual" people speak a 3rd language as well). (See also Talk:multilingual where I suggest the same things in different terms - the original author of that article seems to agree with me.) ----FvdP 19:58 Jan 16, 2003 (UTC)

--

I don't like that idea. We've got two subjects to deal with:

speaking of two languages fluently (or semi-fluently) as currently described in bilingual
speaking of many languages fluently, as currently described in multilingual

Now look at what links to multilingual

William Jones -- sense (2)
Nordfriesland -- sense (2)
Madeleine Korbel Albright -- sense (2)
Paul Pimsleur -- sense (2)
ISO 3864 -- sense (2)
New Orleans, Louisiana -- sense (2), though from the word "polyglot"

Nothing currently links to polyglot.

Now look at what links to multilingual

Brussels -- sense (1)
Sesame Park -- sense (1)
Finland-Swedish -- sense (1)
Stephen Krashen -- sense (1)
Douglas Hofstadter -- sense (1)

I believe that if you make the proposed move, you'll break a lot of links, and people will continue to link to multilingual in sense 2, and get information about sense 1, which will be unhelpful; and vica versa. By contrast, in the current situation natural linking works. Further, polyglot is a much less common term than multilingual occurring only 1/10 as much in a google search. While many bilingual do speak a third language, they do not typically speak the third language to the standard of the other two. Martin

The Koreans living in Japan should not be called Korean-Japanese because they are not Japanese in either aspect of nationality or ethnicity. They have the options to naturalize in Japan and to return to Korea, but they do neither. --Nanshu 01:48 27 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Multilingual[edit]

I propose to merge this article with multilingual. Yes, there is a difference in sense - "two" versus "two or more" -- but the difference is irrelevant to the content of this article, almost all of which applies to speaking more than two languages. --Erauch 05:04, Jun 7, 2005 (UTC)