Beginning

When we think of bilingualism we should normally think of societies which are bilingual. Most hearing people will imagine countries which are bilingual (thinking of that as the real meaning of the word) - before they would think of individuals having two languages. Deaf people often think about individuals, but usually the precise meaning is not clear.

Societal bilingualism means the use of more than one language in that state. Virtually every country in the world is bilingual in this sense as there are groups of people who have native use of a language other than the one used by the majority. This is true in Britain - we have Gaelic, in Scotland, and we have Welsh in Wales. In Ireland we have Irish Gaelic and we have English. These are indigenous languages. In Brazil, we have Portuguese and many other languages spoken in the regions and in Australia, there are aborigine languages as well as English. In most places in the world there are some people who have the use of two languages.

One important point to realise is that when we say a country is bilingual we do not mean that all its members are bilingual. In fact, most of the time, its members are monolingual. This is because the people often live in small communities which are separated from each other. So people use their own language within that small community.

Stop for a moment and try to write down a number of countries where there are more than one language and where you know the people live separately in separate communities

This should not be too difficult as most countries have this situation. In Switzerland there are French-speaking and German speaking areas. There are also Italian speaking and Romansch[1]. In Belgium, there is Flemish part and a French part. In Canada, in Quebec, there is French part and in the rest of the country, English is used. This situation of social bilingualism is different from the situation where the individual has two languages - which we can call bilinguality (not bilingualism - you can have an explanation of this in Hamers & Blanc, 1989).

Other countries where there are strong regional language differences are in Norway and Finland and in many African countries. In some of these countries people have to learn a third language in order to communicate - as in India. Bilingualism of this sort arises in language contact situations or where there are specific purposes. On the borders of countries or regions people are frequently bilingual. In many situations people are multilingual.

... an Indian businessman, living in a suburb of Bombay. His mother tongue and home language is Kathiawari, a dialect of Gujarati; his daily newspaper is in standard Gujarati; in the market, he uses a familiar variety of Marathi, the state language; at the railway station, he speaks the pan-Indian lingua franca, Hindustani; the language of work is Kachchi; in the evening, he will relax in front of a film in Hindi or English, or listening to a cricket match commentary in English.
Encyclo of L & L, 1993, p 355

By comparison to this, the situation for most people in England is very limited as most are unused to seeing or hearing other languages. This has had major implications for our learning of languages and for our attitudes to deaf people and their language. All of this goes to indicate that people all over the world are used to having more than one language available to them. Deaf people, it can be argued, are also more bilingual than hearing people in the UK, because they expect to use sign at the deaf club but English at work.

[1] Romansch or Rhaeto-Romance is a language or group of dialects spoken in southern Switzerland and in Northern Italy. There are a number of dialects which are influenced by the languages around them - French, German, and Italian. There are probably 40,000 users of Romansch in Switzerland which gives them a similar population to deaf people in the UK. However, unlike deaf people, these people also speak another language from early childhood, often as their first language - German or Italian.