Malevitus points out some of the sensible reasons most Americans don’t learn how to speak other languages … and why it makes perfect sense for this situation:
There’s a common complaint about Americans online that goes something like this: “Americans are so dumb. They only know one language, most of the rest of the world is at least bilingual. Why can’t they learn to speak another language?”
To be fair, we Yankees are a pretty monolingual bunch. Only about 20% of Americans speak a language other than English, and for those that do, its mostly because they’re immigrants or children of immigrants. That doesn’t compare favorably to Western Europe, where the majority of adults can speak at least one foreign language (guess which one?)
This is often brought up in the long list of America Bad™ talking points. It’s yet another example of American idiocy. “Europeans can master four languages while Americans are too stupid to master one.” This is pretty much pure copium.
The American Empire
The world we live in is an American world. Since at least the 1990’s (and arguably since the 1940’s), the US has been the undisputed economic and cultural hegemon of the world. Americans don’t learn French or German for the same reason that a Roman in 100 AD would balk at learning Gaulish or Illyrian. Provincials learn the imperial tongue, not the other way around.
For your average non-Anglophone, learning English opens up opportunities in international business, makes it easier to keep up with news from the imperial core, and lets you talk to people around the world (who learned English for all the same reasons you did). For your average American, speaking not-English is a cool trick that takes 600+ hours to learn.
As with any respectable empire, the culture of the periphery is downstream of the core. The influence is largely unidirectional. A typical Frenchman has probably seen Avatar and Titanic. A typical American has definitely not seen Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis or La Grande Vadrouille. The world is buying our blue jeans and listening to our pop music.
[NR: Emphasis mine.]
