Me (in front of my geometry class) (Don’t ask): What do you call someone who speaks three languages?

Several members of the class simultaneously: trilingual.

Me: What do you call someone who speaks two languages?

Several members of the class simultaneously: bilingual.

Me: And what do you call someone who speaks only one language? (a brief pause) American.

The class laughed. Fortunately, they got the point.

A few of my students, of course, are not Americans. They definitely got the point.

The video above explains why you need to be skeptical of those who claim to be polyglots (speakers of more than two languages), especially the fraudsters who claim to speak a ridiculous number of languages but don’t give you the opportunity of hold an unscripted conversation with them in one of those languages.

So why don’t Americans learn other languages? I can pick someone who has been learning French for four years in a good high school, and try to have a real conversation with them in French, and it’s almost always hopeless. Or I can show them a paragraph written in French (for French college students) — again, hopeless. Very few of them are truly fluent in either spoken or written French,

I’m not trying to denigrate foreign-language teaching in the U.S., as the problem is much deeper than that. Mostly I’m setting the stage for the video above by Taylor Jones, often known as Language Jones. He has a Ph.D. in linguistics and makes great videos. Watch the one above, and then randomly pick another one of his videos. You’ll enjoy them, and you’ll learn something.

Then tell me how it happens that someone named Taylor Jones happens to be Jewish. (Note the skullcap.) Inquiring minds want to know.

Categories: Linguistics