Is bilingualism linked to national identity? Evidence from a big data survey

Abstract

Psychological variables remain a much under-investigated sub-category of individual differences (IDs) compared with cognitive ones. The present paper aims to gain a better understanding of the psychological effects of bilingualism by investigating national identity (NI), a socio-psychological construct, based on big data, that has rarely been examined. Drawing upon the 2015 Chinese Social Survey (CSS), which utilised a nationally representative sample (N = 10242), we employed a ‘more refined’ version of hierarchical regression analysis on the influence of foreign-language (FL)-based bilingualism and other sociobiographical variables on NI. Out of the 18 initial independent variables, satisfaction with life (1.7%–2.2%) and age (1.2%–1.4%) emerged as important predictors for NI as their minimum effect size value (ΔR2, see the range in brackets) exceeded the ‘typical’ benchmark (1%); in contrast, the influence respectively from FL mastery (.006%–.040%) and FL use (.000%–.004%) was negligible. In other words, our key finding is that a person’s FL-based bilingualism had little to do with his/her NI. Implications for China’s plan to reform FL (e.g. English) learning are discussed, and future research directions are also proposed.

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