Talk:Multilingualism

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Abstract

The preface contains the sentence "More than half of all Europeans claim to speak at least one language other than their mother tongue; but many read and write in one language.", which seems neither here nor there and kind of nonsensical to begin with. Maybe someone feels like rephrasing that. 2001:A61:2556:5001:F151:C67B:3FE8:DE1D (talk) 17:59, 2 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Wiki Education assignment: Multilingualism and Language contact

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 20 October 2022 and 16 December 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Zesp2026 (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Zesp2026 (talk) 00:29, 6 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Definition of multilingualism seems (too) narrow

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)[reply]

Wikipedia Ambassador Program course assignment

This article is the subject of an educational assignment at Roosevelt University supported by the Wikipedia Ambassador Program during the 2012 Q3 term. Further details are available on the course page.

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

Structural problems in the article?

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)[reply]