David1917 wrote:Lots of anecdotal back-and-forth here, which does nothing for sweeping statements.
We know it is a fact that USA'ians are notoriously monolingual. It is largely cultural. That breeds laziness. I mean, it's gotten to the point that it's too much to ask people to know how to multiply a restaurant tab by 1.2 in order to calculate a tip - now either the restaurant provides those options for you (15, 18, 20%) or you get a nice app where you can punch in the total and it does all the scary math for you. People can complain all day long about how much they don't "get" math or "get" languages, but both are untrue. You do and can "get" them, you're just given an impetus not to, and people naturally take the path of least resistance. That is the definition of laziness. I should maybe add that I don't mean that it makes you a bad person to be lazy.
Could it be that you're not all that travelled outside the States, or move in the wrong circles? I don't know, maybe you are well-travelled, but then it puzzles me why you'd have missed some obvious things. I've met a fair few of Americans in many countries and most spoke other languages. I'm not talking about casual tourists (though even there you see it) or people on a gap year or people working for Shell posted overseas. This would mean, I assume, that these are the ones who speak other languages. The rejoinder would then be: 'aha! but this is a minority...the exceptions that prove the rule. The rest are all monolinguals.' To which my answer would be: 'so what?' Do you really think that everywhere else outside the U.S. UK AUS the majority of every country's population is uniquely comprised of polyglots? People seem to think this and will claim it endlessly, but it's pure, unadulterated drivel, increasingly so. The very least 'requirement' now is that people speak English and even that is not guaranteed outside the metropolises (or in them!). All historical pluri-linguistic requirements were caused by circumstances; previously small linguistic groupings meeting one another in shared homelands for trade and forced contact, but unwilling to surrender language identity.
People who aren't language enthusiasts learn languages for purely practical reasons and it is often a chore. This goes for for most of Europe too. Even the much-vaunted places like Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland. In Switzerland, that oft-quoted example of pluri-linguistic paradises (I've worked there), there are many people in the French areas who are pretty much hopeless at German, go there and try it. The French, like in France itself, are very keen for people to speak French, but not quite so keen on having to learn other languages. Sound familiar? German teaching in Geneva is half-hearted. By contrast French instruction in German speaking areas is taken more seriously.
Whilst in some sense an argument could be made that English dominance has contributed to relieving native English speakers of the immediate burden of learning other languages, this is no argument for especial cases of cultural idiocy. It's not only the U.S. that has been moving towards a policy of a national language over the last few hundred years; it happened in Germany and France and Italy and China... You can bet your bottom dollar if history had unfolded differently at various junctures there would be another language from somewhere in a dominant global position and people would be calling its native speakers 'lazy' for relaxing and capitalising on the fact that everyone speaks their language.
The topic of the thread (and what it related back to) is indeed more an opinion and thought experiment, because it is not a real prospect.