What percent of the world can fluently speak at least two languages?

gmackematix

Many sites claim that at least half of the world's population is bilingual with at least one sayng it is as much as two-thirds. While parts of Europe and most of the USA contain a majority of monolingual people (monoglots), this is not the normal state of affairs in most of the world. [Oct 04 04 7:24 PM] gmackematix writes: As well as there being a section under "Blingual" in Wikipedia, the following article says a bit more: http://www.ericdigests.org/2000-3/global.htm [Oct 04 04 8:07 PM] gmackematix writes: All this, of course, assumes that by "knows at least two languages", you mean is able to speak them rather than just knows of them! Oct 04 04, 6:14 PM

Arpeggionist

Actually, in much of Europe people speak English as well as whatever the language is in their country. In Germany I was easily able to get from point A to point B on my rusty German and the English being spoken in the airport. About half the Israeli population is bilingual or even trilingual (Hebrew, English, Russian and Arabic are the languages used here). Even in the US, while most people outside New York City will be comfortable only in their own local dialect, in NYC itself I could easily switch between English, French, German, Italian, Yiddish, Russian, Hebrew and Korean in mid sentence. (I can't do that anymore.) Oct 05 04, 1:23 AM