How many people in this world are at least fluently Bi-lingual out of the 6.5+ billion?=(10 points good answe?

Question

Well its kind of a homework assignment i was just wondering if anyone could let me know or direct me to a website that knew.

Answer 1

Well, in India and the Continent of Africa, almost everybody speaks at least two languages.

For example, many whites in South Africa speak Afrikaans and English. Most Black Africans speak at least one tribal language (usually 2) in addition to colonial languages like Portuguese (Angola, Mozambique), French (Senegal, Niger), English (Uganda, Nigeria) etc.

In India, each state has an official language. Also, most Indians speak Hindi. Also, many educated Indians speak English and Urdu.

So, if you add just India's population (1,132,446,000) and Africa's (922,011,000). That gives you at least 1.5 billion people who are fluently bilingual.

Now, let's look at Europe. Europe has 722 million people. Many Europeans are capable of speaking three or four languages. I'd say at least half of the Euro population can speak another language fluently. (For example, Lithuanians, Fins, and Ukranians probably all speak Russian as well as their own languages (because of Russian dominance in the area). Icelanders, Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians usually speak English in addition to their native languages. Many people pick up French as a second or third language.

So, add 361 million from Europe plus at least 1.5 billion in Africa/India, and we are almost at 2 billion.

Then think about China. How many of China's 2 billion people can speak both Mandarin and Cantonese? How many of those guys can speak Mandarin, Cantonese, plus some of the minor languages their grandparents might still speak? Add another 300 million.

So, I'd say that around 2 BILLION people in the world are at least FLUENTLY bilingual.

Answer 2

You can't give a number because not everyone is tested on the languages they claim to speak.

For instance, they say India has Hindi as the primary language and English as the secondary.  How many Indians do you really think speak English properly? Just because they can say, "hello, I'm sorry I ran over your cat" doesn't declare them as bilingual.

It's really hard to say without testing each human, in my opinion.