by Gideon MacLeish

Created on: March 13, 2007   Last Updated: April 30, 2007

It is the boast of the average Euro-snob that Europeans can speak multiple language. Their intent is to belittle and ridicule Americans, many of whom speak only variations of Americans.

We live in a culture that's fairly unique worldwide; while European countries routinely encounter people from bordering countries, only one of our two neighboring countries actually speaks another language, and only four of our fifty states border that country. The closer one gets to the Mexican border, the higher the percentage of bilinguals; and in the border communities almost everyone speaks a fair amount of both languages.

Therefore, our failure to speak many languages is based on the fact that most Americans do not NEED to know multiple languages, and thus they don't learn them. I have learned three "non-native" languages in my lifetime: French, German, and Spanish. Of the three, the one in which I have the least formal training (Spanish) is the one in which I'm most fluent. Simply because I have rarely spoken French since high school, and I've NEVER had the opportunity to use my German. The German language is pretty much wiped out of my memory bank, actually, and I can barely even count to ten.

So I would be one of those you would point to as ignorant because I cannot communicate in other languages. Yet I have the ability, but not the opportunity.

Another reason that we do not communicate in other languages is because of the nature of our culture. Our culture is meant to be a blended culture, and language is the one common thread that binds us. Because we welcome immigrants from all corners of the globe, it would be absolutely impossible for us to learn every language of every immigrant culture; if our immigrants were restricted largely to those in bordering nations, it might be different.

Go to France and find out how many citizens speak Mandarin Chinese. Go to India and see how many Spanish speakers you find. These cultures do not learn these other languages because there simply is no need.

So before you go writing Americans off as arrogant, consider that there may possibly be another explanation.

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