How many languages should a well-educated man speak?

I suppose one could say being multilingual is often a trait of being well-educated, but as I stated above, I think one must be careful when stating "being educated means 'this' (whatever 'this' may be)." I think Socrates would have a field day with the argument that being educated means being multilingual. Let's suppose there were some amazing rocket scientist that could only speak one language. Are we to conclude that this individual isn't "educated" despite his or her incredible skills at math and science?

mjd,
In my humble opinion there are certain things that "well-educated person" should know. By "well-educated person" I mean someone who graduated from a university or equivalent.
When I see people boasting about their education but are not able to say what is the capital of, let's say, Sweden, or do not know who Franz Kafka was and do not speak any foreign language - I am very sad.
I'm talking about Europe now because I do not expect people from eastern Asia to know all about Shakespeare as we do not know too much about their writers/masterpieces and so on.

The thing is that often in middle and or high school here, and usually as a college requirement, having taken <such and such> number of semesters of some foreign language is required, but in that fashion means that one can *really* speak <such and such> language other than English. Practically all people who go to any sort of college above, say, a technical college here have taken some semesters of some foreign language, but that in *no* fashion means that they can really speak such.

Here, I would say that I know in person probably two or three people, period, who are fluent in more than just English and who were born in the US, one being this friend of mine who is most definitely fluent in German, even though English is his native language, someone I know from high school who speaks Vietnamese with his parents, and my maternal grandma, whose native language is Polish, not English, but then I'm not sure if she's really actually fluent in Polish anymore despite it being her first language. Everyone else I know who's from the US per se is probably only fluent in English, even though they've almost certainly taken classes in languages other than it.

I would have thought that it would be more "natural" for Americans to be less monolingual than the British, seeing that most of them, if not all, originate from a wide variety of countries.

They even live in "colonies" in some States, such as IOWA for instance, where many of the people are of German heritage. It's quite surprising that each succeeding generation did not keep the "old Language" alive by learning it and making sure their children did the same. Bit of a puzzle that. Did the desire to become true All-Americans, swearing allegiance to their new Homeland every day and all that, mean they had to forgo their linguistic heritage?

The thing is that while languages other than English were preserved to some extent or another up to about two generations ago, most people my parents' age or so who were born here are English-monolingual, or if they do know a language besides English, it was a language they learned in school, and one in which they are not fluent, even if their parents were not, which was often the case (such as on both sides of my family). As for people my generation here, those who didn't specifically have parents who were born outside the US generally have *no* exposure outside school to any languages other than English and have parents who themselves only speak English.

Each of my parents were definitely different cases in this respect. In the case of my dad, my dad's family (especially a particular close relative of his, known to me just as "Nana") tried to get him to learn German (they required him to take it in school, for instance), which pretty much the entire family before his generation spoke, but he specifically resisted such. Apparently, he saw no use in it, and he seems to actually have a rather negative view of German, viewing it as just a language for old people, which might as well be abandoned; that actually seems to extend to my own learning German as well, which he makes semi-sarcastic remarks about every once in a while.

In my mom's case, however, she seemed to have very little if any exposure to Polish, and there was very little impetus for her to learn it at all, even though it is clear that she had a number of relatives of her parents' generation who were not fluent in English. I've heard her oldest brother speak once in Polish a bit, but that seems to have been the limit of her and her siblings' collective knowledge of Polish (unlike, in the case of my dad's oldest brother, who does speak German, along with French, but isn't fluent in it).

How many languages should a well-educated man speak ?
I think three : His, mine and yours.

My experience is similar to Travis. I personally know only 2 non-English speakers. One of them is a native Spanish speaker who learned English, the other is a native English speaker who married a Spanish speaker, and I don't think she's fluent yet. Although Spanish has become quite common in my area, that only happened recently. When I was in high school, there was no sign that Spanish, or any other language, would be of much use unless you travelled to other countries.

I understand your reponses....it could, in a way, be compared to my own situation in that I know scarcely a word of Gaelic as I live in a part of Scotland where it is as dead as the dodo...you are much more likely to hear German, French, Dutch or Spanish or whatever on the streets of Edinburgh....even Japanese.

Anyway, the history of Language issues here goes back a great deal further in time than the same situation in the USA...a "young" country in comparison....this area of Scotland has been English speaking for centuries (ignoring the Scots dialect which is different...I can break out into Scots at will).

America has become the country it now is by means of immigration from all cultures and Languages, and I just think it's a pity that succeeding generations have gradually lost the link by not learning the Language of their origins, but I reckon it's inevitable.

They became part of the American melting Pot, with a "new" clearly defined American identity in which it so happened that English became the widely accepted Language of the country (if not yet the "oficial" one by all accounts). That was probably due to the origins of the Pilgrim Fathers back in 1620 who set the foundation stone of the eventual United States, a process that took until the 20th century to complete.

It's just that this happened here in Scotland many centuries earlier.

Now social trends and other things tend to happen over your side of the Pond earlier than they do on this side. That may be a good thing in SOME respects....from our point of view! :-)

Travis:
"Everyone else I know who's from the US per se is probably only fluent in English, even though they've almost certainly taken classes in languages other than it. "

Cro Magnon:
"I personally know only 2 non-English speakers. One of them is a native Spanish speaker who learned English, the other is a native English speaker who married a Spanish speaker, and I don't think she's fluent yet."

I find this absolutely bewildering and, in a way, sad. It is quite the reverese in my case. There are hardly any people I know (both in Europe and in Canada) who speak only one language. However, my friends and people in the social circles I move in do boast above average levels of education.

In Canada, many people send their children to immersion schools, in which (although English is their first language) they do about half the learning in French. These children, naturally, come out of high school as highly proficient in French (or some other language of immersion).

I must admit, though, that there are probably more Canadians than Europeans among the monolinguals I know.

......sadly in a predominantly monolingual Scotland.

The Continental European countries are much better placed for learning and speaking two or more Languages than we are here in the UK. They all have common land borders and there is much more intermingling and closer proximity to each other so it's inevitable they speak each other's Languages much more readily.

From this point of view it's a great drawback being an island country (even though we have areas of Language other than English as we've discussed at length to the point of exhaustion in here). Even though we Celtics among the UK population appear (undoubtedly in my opinion) to find it easier to pronounce other Languages than do the English (who seem to take great delight in mangling "foreign" names...I include Scottish and Welsh here...particularly the last!) we still pay the penalty of having English as our native Language....the Language now perceived (rightly or wrongly) to be the world's prime means of communication, and the Language of the world's only "Superpower", the USA of course.

This leads to a mentality of "why learn another Language when everybody else speaks and understands my own". That truly is a block to any real desire to learn another Language.

I know that once I have completed my current professional courses, I will make every effort personally to learn other Languages to a better standard than I learned at school...it wouldn't be fair to state which in this Forum right now... I don't think. :-)

Would speaking both Scots and Scottish English in parallel count as being bilingual though? That's like a similar case that I can think of, where in northern Germany today, basically anyone who can speak Low Saxon can almost certainly also speak German, which'd make such individuals (most likely natively) bilingual in the first place, except that many people don't really think of it that way, and still sort of think of Low Saxon as being "just" a highly divergent set of dialects of German, rather than as fully independent language with respect to German.

(Of course though, it's still funny that I know someone in real life in for some reason knows how to speak Low Saxon but *does not* know how to speak German per se, even though for the longest time he didn't know that he didn't speak German, and thought of Low Saxon as German (which I confirmed by asking him what certain words were in German, and the basically said the Low Saxon words for such)... until he did really horribly in German class here in the US, speaking and writing in what he thought was German.)

<<Kirk : I really appreciate the way you write. Reading your prose is always enjoyable and instructive.>>

Thanks, greg, I'm glad you enjoy it. I think I may've told you this before but I think your English is not only superb, you write well in it, too :)

<<I would have thought that it would be more "natural" for Americans to be less monolingual than the British, seeing that most of them, if not all, originate from a wide variety of countries.

They even live in "colonies" in some States, such as IOWA for instance, where many of the people are of German heritage. It's quite surprising that each succeeding generation did not keep the "old Language" alive by learning it and making sure their children did the same. Bit of a puzzle that. Did the desire to become true All-Americans, swearing allegiance to their new Homeland every day and all that, mean they had to forgo their linguistic heritage?>>

Maybe. But I think the phenomenon of the "old-country" languages being lost has more to do with the simple linguistic phenomenon that people will learn and use what is most convenient. This has happened all thruout human history. As much as people try to keep the "old country" language alive in the family, the sheer forces of necessity dictate in most cases that those languages die out, as they're not dominant in the larger cultural context. This has happened even when the people are living in a very peripheral existence (where you'd think they'd not want to adopt the popular language) such as the people living in Japan of Korean descent. Small communities of them have been there for 4-5 generations and even tho I believe Japan still doesn't consider them citizens ( ?!?!), the younger generations only speak Japanese.

In Argentina over half the population is of Italian descent yet by now hardly anyone speaks Italian (natively)--just Spanish. The list could go on. Experience has shown (for better or worse), no matter how hard people or governments try (or not try) to preserve languages in these situations, the dominant cultural language is almost sure to become the dominant language of subsequent generations.

<<America has become the country it now is by means of immigration from all cultures and Languages, and I just think it's a pity that succeeding generations have gradually lost the link by not learning the Language of their origins, but I reckon it's inevitable.>>

It is somewhat sad, but some Americans do indeed make an effort to learn (nonnatively, of course) the languages of some of their forebears. Of course it makes it complicated when they're from all over the place. There's a common phenomenon here of 3rd generation Americans trying to learn the "old country" languages--a lot of Hispanic politicians here in California who are 3rd or 4th generation Americans have found it necessary to learn Spanish in order to connect on a deeper level with more recent Hispanic immigrants. For example, Antonio Villaraigosa, who was just recently elected mayor of Los Angeles, is an American of Mexican descent (a couple generations back, I believe), but is not a native speaker of Spanish--he's learned it nonnatively like many other Californians. I saw that often in my own Spanish classes in high school, where 2nd, 3rd, or 4th+ generation Mexican-Americans were trying to learn Spanish in order to "reconnect" with an aspect of their cultural background, or even for practical reasons such as speaking with grandma or great-grandma in her native language.

I agree with Ved that it's kind of bewildering to hear other Americans that hardly know any multilingual people. I must live in a different world here in California (it is simply impossible to live my daily life without hearing at least a handful of different languages, and also to see people I know that are multilingual, especially because of cultural heritage), but even then I know the kind of multilingual situation we see here is not uncommon in other metropolitan areas in the US, so it's not just California.

Well, Kirk, the big caveat that I marked above was that I was referring to fluently multilingual individuals who were actually born here in the US; I've known more fluently multilingual individuals than just three, but they aren't originally from the US (well, except for one, and I personally haven't been in contact with her for so long, as she's moved back "over there" with her family, that I can't say I personally know her).

<<Well, Kirk, the big caveat that I marked above was that I was referring to fluently multilingual individuals who were actually born here in the US.>>

Oh, ok, well I should've made that clear that I was surprised other Americans hardly knowing multilingual American-born people.

oops, typo...that should be:

"Oh, ok, well I should've made that clear that I was surprised other Americans hardly knew multilingual American-born people."