Talk:Multilingualism

The current article text contains:

”Multilingual people can speak any language they write in, but cannot necessarily write in any language they speak.”

Why would people who, by whatever cause or for whatever reason, do not speak one or some of the languages they master through other means, be they writing, signing or reading, excluded from being called multilingual?

I propose to change the text to e.g.:

”Multilingual people can communicate any language they master, but may not be able to communicate in it through all of its modes. Possible modes include speaking, writing, typing, morse-coding, signing, listening, reading, morse-decoding.”

Other modes may exist; I remember having read about a whistling language practised in Türkiye.Redav (talk) 14:09, 28 December 2022 (UTC)

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The above message was substituted from {{WAP assignment}} by PrimeBOT (talk) on 15:57, 2 January 2023 (UTC)

I've just stumbled upon this article and the way the sections are structured have confused me quite a bit. The most glaring one is a long list of languages and countries that speak them under the heading of Europe. At first I thought this was a list of either the European countries with shared languages (of which there are many) or a list of languages historically from Europe which are spoken widely in many countries (of which there are also a few). However, neither seems to be the case. To cite just one example which confused me, "Chinese in China, Taiwan, Singapore, and to a co-official extent in Malaysia and Brunei." I don't understand why this is included in this list. If there's a good reason, so be it. If not, or if otherwise there are no objections, I can take a crack at restructuring some of this. Rserramilli (talk) 14:06, 9 November 2024 (UTC)

I don't see the problem with this section. For the languages that I know are spoken in different countries, they all seem correct. The only problem is that they are not limited to Europe. Lova Falk (talk) 08:47, 11 April 2025 (UTC)

I'd agree that there is a structure problem here. I don't have a complete proposal to a solution to it yet, but this page and the Polyglot (computing) page feel a bit disordered.

I recently added a section to refer to artificial languages (happy to talk about that separately), but I still feel that programming languages are underrepresented here, and the distinction between localization and fluency in various programming languages should be clarified.

Ideally there should be some hierarchy and synergy within these articles which correlates to language taxonomy. Kyle-Falconer (talk) 16:39, 29 November 2025 (UTC)

The text reads "bidirectional bilingual instruction". Could anyone clarify what this means? Thanks! 130.239.190.10 (talk) 15:42, 6 April 2025 (UTC)

 Done I exchanged the term bidirectional for the more commonly used two-way, and wrote: a form of dual language education that brings together students from two different language backgrounds to learn in both languages. Lova Falk (talk) 08:30, 11 April 2025 (UTC)