Cyprus-Forum.com

[Novus]

Filitsa,

Nobody mentioned English before my post, everyone was talking about languages. One or more!

I only speak English so therefore I am among the 80-81% of English only speaking Americans. My statement is correct. My statement did not need a qualifier to still be true and I did not need to provide detail just to make you happy. Live with it.

[CBBB]

I still want to know about the other 10%! Did it get lost?

[Novus]

I still want to know about the other 10%! Did it get lost?

Of the remaining 20% some are multi-lingual and some are non-English speaking monolingual.
Since I am neither, I just mentioned I am among the 80% or 81% of English-only speaking Americans. I figured people would be smart enough to understand the difference without me spelling it out (apparently I was wrong about some people's reasoning abilities)
Since the original statement by Filitsa was that 9% were bi-lingual, that does not mean that the remaining 91% are all mono-lingual because obviously some are tri-lingual and some speak more than three languages fluently, so that alone should suggest to even the most daft that it is not a 91% to 9% split and if I said I was among the 91%, then that would suggest I might possibly be tri-lingual which is also non-bi-lingual.
So therefore for sake of accuracy I just referred to the category and percentage figure I belonged to, e.g. the 81% English-only Americans.[/b]

[CBBB]

You didn't mention English only, which was probably a good thing as that is not a language Americans speak.

[denizaksulu]

So if 9% speak more than one language and 81% speak only one language, are the other 10% unable to speak or does the inadequacy of American brains stretch to mathematics as well?

Smoke signals come to mind.

[Filitsa]

Filitsa,

Nobody mentioned English before my post, everyone was talking about languages. One or more!

That is, CBBB, languages, one or more, in light of Americans. Apparently, you didn't get the joke and you either did not read the article in the link that Novus provided or you read it and did not comprehend it, perhaps because it was your intention to insult Americans, as evidenced by your initial post, rather than to understand the thread.

I will give you the benefit of the doubt this time and explain that the statistics are unique to the U.S. where English is the first language. The statistics define a monolingual as one who is conversive in English only, bilingual as one who is conversive in English and another language, and multilingual as one who is conversive in English and more than one other language.

According to the definitions above, 9% of Americans are bilingual, 81% (or as in Novus's link, 80%, the difference being negligible) are conversive in English only, and 20% are either multilingual or are conversive only in a language other than English.

[CBBB]

I got the joke and the link wasn't posted until after my initial comments.

You also now have 110%!

QED

[Filitsa]

I got the joke and the link wasn't posted until after my initial comments.

You also now have 110%!

QED

Edit typo: 10%, not 20%.