garyb wrote:The "glorious past and mediocre present" part seems more appropriate to French, although it's widely-spoken enough that it likely has a brighter future than Italian.
The fifth most spoken language in the world has a mediocre present?
I have a kind of feeling that people are speaking from weird bubbles here.
einzelne wrote:I think what's really overrated is a mythical "economic gain" of knowing a foreign language. Because in the majority of cases it's almost non-existent.
I mean, most actual "polyglots", bilinguals and such are minorities, whether autochtones and immigrants (1st or 2nd gen), and they usually aren't among the richer demographics.