Published January 14th
Michael Erard is the author of the book "Babel no more"
See : The gift of tongues (The Economist) and The Art of Mastering Many Tongues (NY Times)
AMERICANS are often told that in today’s globalized world, we are at a competitive disadvantage because of our lazy monolingualism. “For too long, Americans have relied on other countries to speak our language,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said at the Foreign Language Summit in 2010. “But we won’t be able to do that in the increasingly complex and interconnected world.”
The widespread assumption is that few Americans speak more than one
language, compared with citizens of other nations — and that we have
little interest in learning to speak another. But is this true? Read more...