What do you call a person who speaks multiple languages? -- Multilingual (or polyglot as some would have it ;-)
What do you call a person who speaks two languages? --Bilingual
What do you call a person who speaks only one language?
Wait for it...
An American!
Hope that made you chuckle...
3 comments:
Indeed...very true.
Sad but true. I read in a book called "The Atlas of Languages" that about half of the world's population is multilingual. I also heard (I believe it was on a cool website called vistawide.com) that only 17% of Americans can speak more than one language. So learn a language. Or two. Or twenty. I'm going to get busy learning Shona - the main language of Zimbabwe - as I am making a trip to Southern Africa in August.
It makes sense that half of the world is multilingual. At a minimum, anyone in an industrialized country learns English because it is the language to know if you want to go anywhere with your career. Any bets on the next dominant language? There are speculations that it will be Chinese because they appear to be the next superpower as the U.S. declines. Another viable scenario where China does indeed become the world's leader is that English remains the common language just like Greek did during the time of the Roman Empire... Thoughts? Comments? Laments? Conjectures?
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