This looks like a very useful development. I find this a strange attitude:
Let’s just remember that bilingual speakers are by definition fluent in two languages yet are too often deemed uneducated or undeserving of opportunity simply for sounding not quite like the people we see on TV.
As someone really only fluent in one language, I’m always impressed by people who are bi- or multi-lingual, even if they have an accent.
Seeing beyond prejudice requires bypassing hardwired circuits.
Abstractions are by definition false, but we can’t operate without them.
If someone who speaks three languages is trilingual, and someone who speaks two languages is bilingual, what do you call someone who speaks one language?
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American.
Old joke.
Trying to board the correct motorcoach bus outside the Osaka airport, I approached the nearest East Asian-looking man and asked for help in my phrase-book Japanese. In a California surfer-dude accent he replied, “Sorry, can’t help you — I am from Taiwan and don’t speak the language.”
At the glacier park in Austria, I turned to talk to a man in my Grandma’s Ausland dialect of German. “Sorry, I’m from Poland — do you speak English?”
Old joke and not particularly funny. The “joke” is only funny if one accepts the belief – long held both by Europeans and by Americans of a leftist bent – that normative Americans are dimwitted insular chauvinists.
No. The reason few Americans are even bi-lingual, never mind polylingual, is that we have no necessity to be. The combined territorial area of the U.S. and Canada is the largest in the world that is, within a few percent, unilingual. From most places in the U.S. an English speaker can easily go 1,000 or more miles along half or more of possible compass headings and still wind up in a place where the vast majority of people speak that same language. There are zero places in Europe where this is possible.
Europe is incredibly linguistically diverse compared to North America. One can even add in Central and South America and that statement still applies. Someone trilingual in English, Spanish and Portuguese can communicate with very nearly everyone in the entire Western Hemisphere. A trilingual speaker of English, French and German has, in contrast, a much more limited geographic range within which the same could be said even given that it is the largest such trilingual range possible in Europe.
European countries are simply much smaller. Anyone who has spent any significant time moving around in Europe quickly notices that in the central areas of the larger European countries, one finds relatively few speakers of other than the native language. Those one does find tend to be English speakers. The smaller the country, the larger the percentage of English speakers. These small nations are also where one finds the majority of European trilinguals and higher-order polyglots. And essentially all these people number English among their fluencies.
The reason isn’t hard to figure out; it’s the economic notion of network effect. For citizens of small European countries, the ability to speak even one language in addition to one’s birth tongue, adds appreciably to the geographic “range” within which one can pursue economic opportunities. Given the sheer number of linguistically distinct European nations and their relatively dinky sizes, it’s small wonder that most Europeans who speak a foreign language speak English. It lets them communicate with English-speakers from other European countries. Learning English, in other words, confers the maximum benefit upon its non-native speakers relative to the effort required to become fluent in any second language.
Citizens of Anglosphere nations are fortunate that learning a foreign language is optional and not a practical necessity as it is in quite a bit of the rest of the world. Given how little additional “range” any single additional acquired fluency provides the average native English speaker, the wonder is that aren’t even fewer bi-linguals and above in their ranks.
It also is easier if you grow up knowing more than one language, which seems to make it easier to learn more later. The main opportunity for Americans to do this is either Jews who learn Hebrew, or people who live in Hispanic areas.
Don’t students have to take several years of foreign language in the USA? The problem is that it happens in the teenage years rather than in grade school.
Actually a lot of Americans, at least in California, can speak Spanish as a 2nd language quite decently.
When I lived in Japan, it was fashionable to have TV “talento” who were 2nd or 3rd generation Japanese-Americans and who spoke Japanese with an American accent.
I’ve been to a few space conferences in Europe where all of the Western nations participated, and the language spoken was English. Technical, even idiomatic English. The last one was in Germany, and I took my (now) wife and older son. On our last night, we went to the Hofbrauhaus. During a visit to the men’s room, I began speaking with an early 20 something young German who spoke such perfect English that I expressed my embarrassment at the fact that Americans didn’t have the linguistic range of the average European (he spoke six languages). But I explained that America is many times the size of Europe, and has a single language. Most of our population never has any need to learn another language.
I almost added “Unless we go to war, which we really haven’t done on a large scale since the 1940s.” But I thought that would be a little insensitive….
Decades ago I got around Greece on buses because Greek letter were used in math. “L sounds like G’ would get me to glyfada! Also, if you buy a round of drinks at a table of American service people, you won’t have to buy a drink for the rest of the night! Back then, anyway.
Funniest was watching my Vietnamese college roommate in Chinatown. He spoke 3 languages and none were Chinese.