Word.ws English Dictionary

How to use bilingual in a sentence

39 example sentences · adjective, noun

Bilingual means having the ability to speak two languages fluently. Example: “It is becoming more usual these days to rear children as bilingual.”

Examples of bilingual by meaning

adjectiveHaving the ability to speak two languages fluently.

  • He thinks it's chic to have a bilingual wife.1980, Paul Schrader, American Gigolo, spoken by Michelle (Lauren Hutton)
  • Since she is bilingual she has them written in both English and Spanish.1998, Bruce Fife, The Birthday Party Business, →ISBN, page 176
  • Instead of nonnative speakers, we should be called bilingual or multilingual speakers.2021 December 18, Ching Ching Tan, “Spielberg’s West Side Story shows us the value of multilingualism”, in CNN

adjectiveSpoken or written in two different languages.

  • a bilingual dictionary
  • All signage in and around the station is bilingual in Welsh and English, while station announcements and passenger information screens provide real-time information.2020 December 30, Paul Stephen, “Chirk station is truly blooming”, in Rail, page 48

nounA person who is able to use two languages.

  • Most striking, numerous studies have even shown that bilinguals undergo a later onset of dementia, perhaps of around four years, on average.2025 June 27, “Is being bilingual good for your brain?”, in The Economist, →ISSN, archived from the original on 27 Jun 2025

More sentences with bilingual

  • It is becoming more usual these days to rear children as bilingual.From the entry usual
  • As with many bilingual families, it was normal to observe frequent code-switching at our dinner table.From the entry code-switching
  • At the frontiers where Yamnaya pastoralists interacted with settled agriculturalists, local variants developed among bilingual populations.2025 December 12, Tom Hercules Davies, “Horses, Wheels, Languages: Greek, Mesopotamian and Indic Epic on the Eurasian Steppe”, in The…. From the entry Yamnaya
  • Bilingual children often and naturally switch between their codes or mix them.2022, Annika Pasanen, Johanna Laakso, Anneli Sarhimaa, “The Uralic minorities: Endangerment and revitalization”, in Marianne Bakró-Nagy…. From the entry unicodal
  • The auxiliaries also occasionally left behind bilingual dedications in Palmyrene with Greek or Latin.2017, Kyle H. Keimer, Gillan Davis, Registers and Modes of Communication in the Ancient Near East. From the entry Palmyrene
  • A common game played by bilinguals is to Algerianize French words, and Frenchify AA words.2013, Aleya Rouchdy, Language Contact and Language Conflict in Arabic, Routledge, →ISBN, page 247. From the entry Algerianize
  • I think the politicians have missed the opportunity to make education bilingual for all.2011 June 10, Tamara Gausi, quoting Ilse Marien, “Are chips really the best thing about Belgium?”, in The Guardian. From the entry flemish
  • A nonswitch trial means that the bilingual responded in the same language twice in a row.2011, Jeanette Altarriba, Roberto R. Heredia, An Introduction to Bilingualism: Principles and Processes, page 87. From the entry nonswitch
  • The Saint-Dominguois, many of whom were bilingual in French and Creole, would have shifted to French.1997, Albert Valdman, French and Creole in Louisiana, Springer Science & Business Media, →ISBN, page 20. From the entry Saint-Dominguois
  • The latter of these is mentioned as the equivalent of corrigere in a bilingual glossarium.1992, J. den Boeft, Daniël den Hengst, H. C. Teitler, editors, Cognitio Gestorum, North-Holland, →ISBN, page 11. From the entry glossarium
  • The bilingual on this pattern and with these intentions will be enormous.1980, The Incorporated Linguist: The Journal of the Institute of Linguists, page 65. From the entry lexicomane
  • Unilinguals and bilinguals other than equilinguals mostly consume mass media products in the language they know best.1979, Alain Desrochers, Richard Clément, The Social Psychology of Inter-ethnic Contact and Cross-cultural Communication, An Annotated…. From the entry equilingual
  • This diminutive bilingual glossarium seems to anticipate Bar Bahlûl’s Lexicon syriacum!1971, Irfan Shahîd, The Martyrs of Najrân: New Documents, Société des Bollandistes, page 36. From the entry glossarium
  • There are already bilingual notices at Southall.2021 October 6, Howard Johnston, “Regional News: Anglia”, in RAIL, number 941, page 29. From the entry Bangla
  • Seventy percent of Latinxes’ ages 5 and older speak English proficiently, yet English proficiency varies across bilingual communities in the U.S.2020, Sheila Bridges-Bond, “A Bilingual Child Diagnosed With Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)”, in Diane M. Scott, editor, Cases on…. From the entry Latinx
  • Studies by Ellen Bialystok at York University in Toronto revealed that bilingual speakers showed a reduced Simon effect compared to monolinguals.2019, Albert Costa, translated by John W. Schwieter, The Bilingual Brain, Penguin, published 2021, page 99. From the entry Simon effect
  • Sometimes we even call them generationally bilingual!2017, Hannah L. Ubl, Lisa X. Walden, Debra Arbit, Managing Millennials For Dummies, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 266. From the entry cusper
  • This particular community sought to remain bilingual because it derived its identity from being both Arab-like and Christian.2011, Yasmine Beale-Rivaya, American Speech, vol. 86, no. 4, Maintaining a Language of Culture: Outcomes of Medieval Iberian Shift as a…. From the entry Mozarab
  • Some bilingual speakers, including some who are ambilingual, can be said to have two (occasionally more) native languages.2009, M.A.K. Halliday, Jonathan J. Webster, Language and Society: Volume 10, page 8. From the entry ambilingual
  • Written first and foremost for the sensibility of the Latina in the US, Cuentos is bilingual and bicultural.1984 April 14, Stephanie Poggi, “Mujeres en Lucha”, in Gay Community News, page 10. From the entry Tex-Mex
  • The Kʷak̓ʷala and Lik̓ʷala bilingual program is a district program housed in Ripple Rock Elementary aimed to develop Kʷak̓ʷala and Lik̓ʷala bilingual speakers.2025, “Kʷak̓ʷala & Lik̓ʷala Bilingual K-5”, in Campbell River School District 72. From the entry Lik̓ʷala
  • But true ambilingual speakers are rare as most of the bilingual speakers restrict at least one of their languages to certain uses.2019, Tarni Prasad, A Course in Linguistics, page 230. From the entry ambilingual
  • Perhaps they had a fleet of bilingual fact-checkers on the case, carefully Zaprudering the Chávez video to determine what exactly was said.2006 October 9, Benjamin Zimmer, “Chomsky killed by interpreter?”, in Language Log. From the entry Zapruder
  • The first panel is a bilingual text in Greek and Palmyrene, the second entirely in Palmyrene, and the third and fourth entirely in Greek.1989, Jean-Marie Dentzer, Winfried Orthmann, Archéologie et histoire de la Syrie, page 74. From the entry Palmyrene
  • Although the first generation is likely to have greater fluency than the undocumenteds, the controversy over bilingual education attests to the persistence of language difficulties.1986, Social Science Quarterly, volume 67, page 676. From the entry undocumented
  • The Yorkshire children were almost bilingual.1930, Alfred Perceval Graves, To Return to All that: An Autobiography, page 208. From the entry come Yorkshire over
  • Thus the study of the language he is supposed to use, to the average American, takes on a sort of bilingual character.[1921 [1919], H. L. Mencken, chapter 1, in The American Language, 2nd edition, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, →ISBN, →OCLC. From the entry on the other hand
  • Many bilingual texts were written specifically for language learners; these are known as "colloquia," because much of their content (though not all of it) is in dialogue form.2016, Eleanor Dickey, Learning Latin the Ancient Way, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 4. From the entry colloquium
  • They were classified into two groups: 11 multilinguals who could speak Japanese, Taiwanese and Mandarin Chinese, and 10 bilinguals who only spoke Taiwanese and Mandarin Chinese.2015 November 11, “More Delusions May Be Observed in Low-Proficient Multilingual Alzheimer’s Disease Patients”, in PLOS ONE, →DOI. From the entry multilinguals
  • The Mozarabs were bilingual in Romance and Arabic and lived along the border area (north of the border to be precise) between Christian Iberia and Al-Andalus.2011, Yasmine Beale-Rivaya, American Speech, vol. 86, no. 4, Maintaining a Language of Culture: Outcomes of Medieval Iberian Shift as a…. From the entry Mozarab
  • Nearly half of the Moroccan population is Berberophone; i.e. they are monolingual Berbers, and the majority of them are bilingual because they also speak Dialectal Arabic.2005, Moha Ennaji, “Tuareg and Berber Languages”, in Philipp Strazny, editor, Encyclopedia of Linguistics, volumes 2 (M–Z), New York…. From the entry berberophone
  • Early on Trudeau scorned the idea of making everyone "good, clean, unhyphenated Canadians," and the Reform is explicitly opposed to the Trudeau government's bilingual and multicultural programs.1992, R. Kent Weaver, The Collapse of Canada?, Brookings Institution Press, page 149. From the entry unhyphenated
  • We observe that the word representations induced from bilingual data outperform the monolingual counterparts across a range of evaluation tasks, even though crosslingual information is not available at test time.2016, Simon Šuster, Ivan Titov, Gertjan van Noord, “Bilingual Learning of Multi-sense Embeddings with Discrete Autoencoders”, in arXiv. From the entry crosslingual

Meaning of bilingual

  1. adjective Having the ability to speak two languages fluently.
  2. adjective Spoken or written in two different languages.
  3. adjective Characterized by the use or presence of two languages.

Full definition of bilingual

Questions about bilingual in a sentence

How do you use bilingual in a sentence?
Bilingual is used as an adjective and noun. For example: “It is becoming more usual these days to rear children as bilingual.”
What is a short sentence with bilingual?
“a bilingual dictionary”
What does bilingual mean?
Bilingual means having the ability to speak two languages fluently.

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: bilingual (page history and authors) and the entries each sentence comes from. Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws chose the sentences, left out offensive ones and quotations older than 1900, and marked the word in each. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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