Bilingualism in Brazil: An Examination of Its Effect on the Formation of Individual Identities

Abstract

The 21st century has witnessed a substantial increase in research focused on the benefits of bilingualism for individuals. The aspects that have received the most attention have been executive functions. And communication skills. Less is known, however, about the noncognitive and nonlinguistic aspects of bilingualism. Personality psychologists claim that personality is the result of a combination of nature-related and nurture-related factors, but the latter have not been sufficiently addressed in studies on bilingualism. Thus, to bridge this gap, the present contribution pursues this line of inquiry by adopting a quantitative approach to the examination of the self-perceived mobility, employability, and intercultural competence of participants who studied in a bilingual education program. A total of 835 respondents living in Brazil completed an online questionnaire. Mann–Whitney U and Wilcoxon W tests showed higher scores for bilingual graduates than for their nonbilingual counterparts on the three subscales. Correlation analyses revealed moderate-to-high positive correlations between bilingual graduates’ perception of their way of being and their way of life on the one hand, and among their self-perceived mobility, employability, and intercultural competence on the other. Likewise, the analyses showed statistically significant positive correlations between being proficient in more than one foreign language and the dimension of mobility. Our findings illustrate the influence that bilingualism/multilingualism exerts on factors that determine everyday life and corroborate and expand the research conducted in this strand. Avenues for further related research are discussed.