Interpretation of Data

The data that I have collected shows that many bilingual adults are also currently living in bilingual homes with their families. Of the people I surveyed, many also thought that being bilingual was very important to them both at work and at home. Being bilingual can connect you to your heritage and can come in handy especially if you want to communicate with older generations in your family. A lot of people also mentioned how being bilingual can help in the work place and provides more job opportunities because as the world is becoming more globally connected, companies and big businesses want people who can communicate with a variety of people from different cultures and areas. As for raising children to be bilingual, many said they believe it is important that our children are also bilingual for the same reasons stated above: to connect to their heritage, communicate with their elders, better job opportunities, etc. But they also said that they believe learning other languages will become easier if the children start young. The people I surveyed also said there were some drawbacks to raising children to be bilingual. For example: if you start speaking in two languages to a child before the child is starting to speak, the child may start speaking a lot later then his or her peers do, because they are learning both languages. Also switching back and forth between languages can be tedious sometimes especially when the society around you mostly speaks one language. I think my data shows that many people think that bilingualism is important and they want future generations to carry on being bilingual because it is a valuable skill that can be a big help in life.