this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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Um, plenty of Europeans speak 3 or more languages. Native language, language of the country you're living in, and English.
This. I think european and asian should be swapped in this meme. I think its rarer to see asian speak 3 languages than seeing european speak 3 languages
Surely that depends on where in Asia you're looking at as well? On average, the number of languages people speak is quite different between, say, India and Japan. Or Switzerland vs Romania in Europe.
Meh I only speak English and Norwegian. I can (with extreme difficulty) make myself understood in German, but I wouldn't say I "speak German" . Although anyone who speaks Norwegian can also understand Swedish and Danish (not easily in the case of Danish unless it's written).
As an asian, this has been my experience as well. Of course there are exceptions, but most asians I know (not just in my country) usually just speak 2 languages.
But which part of Asia are you from? Here in India, schools are required (at least on paper) to teach three languages, so most people are at least trilingual.
Well yes but many schools teach sanskrit and its a dead language?
Sanskrit is still spoken in some parts of Karnataka state. Also, only some schools run by the federal government teach Sanskrit. Usually it is (1) the official language of the state, (2) English and (3) Hindi. (If Hindi is the official language of the state, then any other Indian language, or a foreigh language, would be offered. For historical reasons most schools in Tamil Nadu state do not offer Hindi, but will have another third language such as French.)
I think it also really depends where you are, which is why generalising entire continents maybe isn't very useful. Someone from Luxemburg or somewhere in the Netherlands with more recent immigrants is going to be a lot more likely to speak multiple languages than say someone from Russia or more rural France, just as someone from China is more often going to be monolingual compared to someone from India or Singapore
More likely to run into a Portuguese speaker in Luxembourg than Russia for sure.
"Hey let me just make a quick generalization about like three billion people".