A theoretically driven calculation for language dominance and degree of multilingualism

Bilingualism research has long been challenged by a lack of a unified approach to quantifying language dominance and degree of multilingualism. While numerous questionnaires (e.g., LHQ, BLP, LEAP-Q, and LUQ) provide valuable data on language background variables, they lack a standardized formula to compute key measures from it. We introduce two formulas that synthesize critical linguistic variables to efficiently calculate language dominance and a multilingualism score that ranges from perfect monolingualism to native-like proficiency in multiple languages. Validation across two large datasets shows our dominance measure closely aligns with more complex PCA methods while being simpler and more efficient.

• Publication year

  2025

• Venue

  bioRxiv

• Publication date

  2025-06-13

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Linguistics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1101/2025.06.13.659417PMID 40661554PMCID 12259156
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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