Comment on How come in American classrooms they make another language an elective. Why not teach our kids as many languages possible that way if we go somewhere we will kind of have uper hand?

ntd_quiet@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

The country broadly has what’s called a monolingual language ideology. English is prioritized above others. Multilingualism just isn’t viewed as a skill. And thus there’s no large pool of L2 speakers with which to interact regularly enough to learn and maintain an L2. I mean, they certainly exist, but the landscape is quite different from somewhere like Belgium or South Africa or, idk, most countries. Really anywhere where there’s like a home/cultural language, a market language (maybe a pidgin), and an official state language.

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