I'm not surprised at all that so many Europeans, as well as many other people around the world, speak English as a second language. English has basically become the world's Esperanto and when a language is so dominant, there's a real imperative to learn it.

If Dutch or Catalan or Swahili was dominant, most Americans would likely speak Dutch or Catalan or Swahili as a second language.

I don't have the numbers here, but I do know that the percentage of Australians and New Zealanders of European descent who speak a second language is also low relative to that in continental Europe. Is it because they're "ugly Aussies" or "ugly Kiwis" or just a reflection of the reality that they have less of a need to know a foreign language, since English is now, like it or not, the lingua franca?

In South Africa, in some parts along the Indian Ocean and in the Natal area, english is the second or third language. I've witnessed all major issues being settled in zulu.

No. I am not intimidated by Europeans' language skills nor by anything else. Impressed and appreciative of, maybe, but not intimidated.

New research on brain formation shows that there's a whole lot going on in there through adolescence--new pathways opening and ones that are unused being closed off. I think that anything that stimulates children to think differently is good and that learning a second language is one way to do this. So what if they forget it? Who here can remember all the theorems that were drummed into us in high school geometry? I don't think they are any more important than learning French or Spanish or German or even Latin.

Here in Canada, we're fortunate in having French immersion classes right across the country. Early immersion wasn't available to us, but through junior high most of my daughter's classes were taught in French, and through high school half of them were. It didn't hurt her academically--in fact some she had an honours average, and some of the best students in her high school were in immersion. She is now attending a bilingual university. We didn't encourage her to do this because we wanted her to get a "government job," but because it was such a great opportunity.

I am a european and I don't agree with the fact that other poeple (not europeans) might feel intimidated by us because we happen to speak more than one language.
Europe is a language "boiling pot", but those of my generation (I am 33) started to learn a foreign language only from 6th grade. Only in recent years did the government introduce the foreign language since the first grade. In my case I speak 6 languages: apart from italian, I speak romanian (which is my second mother-tongue, because my father is romanian and since I was 3 I was taught it together with italian), english and french fluently, spanish quite well and some german (I have been to Germany quite often). Having been a bilingual mother-tongue since I was a kid, I have always found it easy to learn foreign languages, and I have always loved foreign cultures, but I think it also depends on your personal attitude to know a language, a country and its culture. I have given private language lessons to youngsters in 6th-7th-8th grade and for some of them, learning a language was really difficult, because they actually lacked some basic foundations in italian (they spoke italian dialect in their families and they had serious problems in learning italian grammatical structures too), so if you have these basic problems with your own language, it would be more difficult to learn OTHER languages.

Thanks, Katherine.

I live in Texas and there are boatloads of bilinguals here - English / Spanish - for the same reason that there are bilingual and multilinguals in Europe. It certainly isn't a litmus test for intelligence.

lucky03 . . . to answer your question directly:

IF you EXPECT a European to speak English, then what's wrong with you is that you are arrogant if not statistically correct about one-third of the time.

ttt

In the fateful words of David Gahan of Depeche Mode "People are People" ((8))