101–110 of 161 posts
I read and write in English (comments mostly :-) all the time. Now I have a valid excuse to play team shooters regularly.
(I've learned a fair amount of spanish from sports, very little of which I could ever use in polite company. A few years ago I met someone's parents, and although I hear about mothers all the time on the pitch, it was memorable as the first time I'd been introduced to a real one.)
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So how does dementia incidence in Montreal compare with mono lingual regions?
I don't know. It would indeed be interesting to compare Montreal to Toronto or Vancouver.
Ontario has 14.57 millions inhabitants and about 250 000 people living with dementia.
That's 1.7% in Quebec vs 1.7% in Ontario. Bilinguism does not seem to protect people much outside of Barcelona.
EDIT: British Columbia has apparently somewhere around 70 000 people living with dementia for a population of 5.07 millions, which is about 1.4%.
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I’m pretty sure the only places where being monolingual is common, are the countries where English is the dominant language. If you look at the whole population of the world, it’s more common to know more than one language than it is to know only one. If you’re born in a place that speaks a language other than English, then learning English is very common, and a lot of places (like Singapore) have multiple common lan…
No. In backwater countries like Poland English is caught at school, but people don't speak or write in it. Many still prefer polish-language media because LACK CONFIDENCE in their english. It typically goes like "Oh, I had English 4 years ago at school, I'm not that good". You use English skills to read a label on a shampoo or an instruction manual. English is not spoken or even written regularly . Before the pandemi…
The total population of multilingual people is obviously quite hard to measure. But every study I’ve seen has put it above 50% of the worlds population, with English being the most common second language choice. EU stats on Poland say 1/4 of its population speak a second language well enough to hold a conversation, with the most popular languages being English, German and Russian, in that order.
https://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion/archives/...
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This is why they chose Barcelona, where the use of 2 languages (Catalan and Spanish) was "highly variable" and everyone in the city spoke or at least understood 2 languages: "We wanted to take advantage of this variability, and instead of comparing monolingual and bilingual people, we looked at whether in Barcelona – where everyone is more or less bilingual – there was a certain degree of bilingualism that had neurop…
I think this doesn’t disprove the theory I’ve set out that people who know more languages than the average local population are likely to have other markers correlated with lower Alzheimer’s risk.
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Are immigrants and their children likely to be richer, eat better, etc?
If I were to immigrate to Barcelona I would learn (Galician) Spanish, but perhaps not Catalan. (Though it’s a beautiful language.) I guess I would count as monolingual in their study.
They could have actually gone to hundreds of elderly homes in Barcelona or, for that matter, better, in places where everyone is mostly actively bilingual (central/north Catalonia?) and regions where people are mostly monolinguals (Castille?) and requested anonymized data from medical records with that information (actively spoken languages vs. mental condition), or if that information was not available, to actually request it to be collected across all these centers, and then establish much stronger correlations.
edit: I originally wrote "the methodology was unnecessarily weak for the conclusions", which was wrong to say from my side. We cannot always do what would be best but must do with what is available to us.
Who gets the opportunity to do that if you are living in a native tongue land?
What about 4 languages? I use English at work, Italian with my daughter, Spanish with my wife and Swedish on the street.
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Those who are bilingual, yes.
People that speaks fluent clingon must appear in the Forbes list then.
- What says Lord Stanley? will he bring his power?
- My lord, he doth deny to come.
- Off with his son George's head!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Bosworth_Field#Stanl...