There are trilingual regions in my country. And one neighbouring country is mostly trilingual too(2 official languages + 1 foreign)
Comment on Mongolian. Like the barbecue.
Ascend910@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
They say being bilingual is only impressive if your first language is English. Since you are expected to know English anyways. Is it true?
uis@lemmy.world 9 months ago
current@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
Well nobody can objectively force something to impress you or not impress you. But most people speak more than one language natively or on a regular basis, hell just short of 2 billion people (1/4 the world’s population!) alone are from the Indian subcontinent region, and there the high variation/diversity of languages throughout the region make speaking 3-4 languages well the norm.
Similar story with Indonesia/Papua New Guinea. And most people in Central Asia and many European parts of the former USSR speak Russian as a 2nd language (nearly all Kazakhs, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Baltic people speak Russian natively to a high fluency, while also speaking a 2nd sometimes 3rd native language)
MrsDoyle@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I met a couple in Vanuatu - one of the world’s most language dense nations - whose mother tongues were mutually unintelligible, so they communicated using the country’s official language, Bislama. A lot of bilingual people don’t speak English. Plenty of Eastern Europeans don’t speak English (unpopular during communist rule) but speak say German or Russian as well as Serbocroatian or whatever.
kilgore_trout@feddit.it 9 months ago
When someone asks me which languages I speak, I say Italian.
“…and?” “Well, English of course”
“…and?” “…and that’s it”, I’d admit embarassed.
Among young educated people in most of Europe it is common to speak at least two languages beside your native one.
andy_wijaya_med@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Bilinguals aren’t impressive at all. I think most people are bilinguals. Apparently, according to Journal of Neurolinguistics, we have more bilinguals (43 percent of the world population) rather than monolinguals (40 percent).