Bilinguals, poor people and women...

In a class he teaches on Bilingualism here at Edinburgh University, Professor Joseph Gafaranga recently said "People do not generally become bilingual by being born of linguists." I thought that was a great comment, and said I would quote him on it!

If you go to conferences on Bilingualism, or if you read the research into it, you might get the impression that most bilingual children have parents who are linguists.
So much of the pioneering literature in the field was written by researchers reporting on their own children's development (and clearly there are huge practical advantages for this, but there is the problem of the Observer's Paradox - can we really objectively observe ourselves?).

Yet worldwide the majority of children become bilingual because they grow up in multilingual societies. Relatively little research has been done on these populations. Again this is due to resources and the fact that most research happens in the Western world. But we should be aware of this discrepancy, before making too broad generalistaions from the research that we do have.

To quote another person who recently said something to me that made me laugh: when speaking with my friend Thoko about biases in research, she said "Yes, poor people and women have known about that for a long time!"