Acceso usuarios
Sally Boyd
Americans in Europe are often assumed either to rernain monolingual in English or to become "elite bilinguals." In this paper, the Situation for American parents of school-age children in Denmark, Finland, and Sweden is examined and compared to each other and to the situations of Finns, Turks, and Vietnamese in these and other parts of the Nordic region. The Americans turn out to be among the most frequent users of the majority languages in the countries they are living in, compared to the other three groups studied, while the children have attained a high level of skill in both languages. In some respects, then, they do live up to the label of "elite bilinguals," but the dominance ofthe majority language in the lives ofboth parents and children is perhaps unexpected, considering that they enjoy more choice than other groups in regard to becoming bilingual
