Bilingual is the tenth album (sixth containing original material) by the English dance music group Pet Shop Boys. It has sold about 1,000,000 albums world-wide.

Bilingual continues the heavily instrumented arrangements and backing vocals Pet Shop Boys began making to their music with the album Very. As suggested by the title, the songs on the album have worldwide influences, particularly from Latin America. After the release of their Very album, Pet Shop Boys toured South America and were influenced by the beats and rhythms associated with Latin American music. Three of the songs have bilingual lyrics, mixing the English language with Spanish and Portuguese.

In late 1995, the band had ended their contract with the American branch of EMI, and signed with Atlantic Records. A renewed marketing campaign was launched to promote the band in the U.S. via both radio airplay and club play.

The singles lifted from the album were all successful, with three of them—"Before", "Se a vida é (That's the Way Life Is)" and "A Red Letter Day"—reaching the UK Top 10. A fourth, the English/Spanish language composition "Single-Bilingual", peaked within the Top 20.

Multilingualism is the act of using polyglotism, or using multiple languages, either by an individual speaker or by a community of speakers. Multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. Multilingualism is becoming a social phenomenon governed by the needs of globalization and cultural openness. Thanks to the ease of access to information facilitated by the Internet, individuals' exposure to multiple languages is getting more and more frequent, and triggering therefore the need to acquire more and more languages.

People who speak several languages are also called polyglots.

A multilingual person, in a broad definition, is one who can communicate in more than one language, be it actively (through speaking, writing, or signing) or passively (through listening, reading, or perceiving). More specifically, the terms bilingual and trilingual are used to describe comparable situations in which two or three languages are involved. A multilingual person is generally referred to as a polyglot. Poly (Greek: πολύς) means "many", glot (Greek: γλώττα) means "language".

An album may be understood as a collection of recordings, released as a single package on gramophone record, cassette, compact disc, or via digital distribution, however the concept is found in printed music dating into the early nineteenth century in works by composers such as Schumann and Mendelssohn. The word derives from the Latin word for list.

Today, with the vinyl record no longer being used as the primary form of distribution, the term "album" can still be applied to any sound recording collection, such as those on compact disc, MiniDisc, Compact audio cassette, and digital or MP3 albums.Cover art is also considered an integral part of the album. Many albums also come with liner notes and inserts giving background information or analysis of the recording, reprinted lyrics, images of the performers, or additional artwork and text. These are now often found in the form of CD booklets.

Vinyl LP records have two sides, each comprising one half of the album. If a pop or rock album contained tracks released separately as commercial singles, these were often traditionally placed in particular positions on the album. A common configuration was to have the album led off by the second and third singles, followed by a ballad. The first single would lead off side 2. In the past many singles (such as the Beatles' "Hey Jude" and Bob Dylan's "Positively 4th Street") did not appear on albums, but others (such as the Beatles' "Come Together" and Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone") were part of an album released concurrently. Today, many commercial albums of music tracks feature one or more singles, which are released separately to radio, TV or the Internet as a way of promoting the album. Albums have also been issued that are compilations of older tracks not originally released together, such as singles not originally found on albums, b-sides of singles, or unfinished "demo" recordings.