The British are still on the road to being monolingual.
In The Guardian we read David Bellos how the English are increasingly less likely to learn the second language.
The writer reminds of a childhood London in which only one was spoken in English. Today, London has become the capital where many languages are spoken.
But the learning data is worrying the journalist. Boys and girls are learning less and less the second language in schools, and since the 1990s they have the lowest percentages. Universities do not work better, second-language learning offers have fallen.
According to the journalist, more and more English people think that, in addition to English, they do not need a language other than English. Bellos reminds the Romans. He told me they hadn't been so stupid. Almost the entire population of the Empire was bilingual. The fact that the English do nothing to learn new languages is a new invention that previous civilizations did not do.
Bellos acknowledges the existence of societies that demanded a single language, such as Japan between the middle of the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, but Bellos says that the young English today would not like that attitude that at that time prohibited communication with the world in Japan.
At the time of Easyjet, the airline that allows you to travel at a very low price, the behaviour of the British is very surprising. It has been recalled how the former elite of Europe studied French and how the French spoke other languages: Catalan, Breton, Alsatian... Today, it is said that “everyone speaks English”, but almost all of those speakers also speak another language. It seems that a very small group tends to isolate themselves from the world – says the author – are the English schools that do not have a second language at home. In schools they have hardly been pushed to study Bengali, Urdu or Polish in the courtyard.
Copenhagen, 18 December 1974 At 12 noon a ferry arrived at the port, from where a group of about 100 Santa Claus landed. They brought a gigantic geese with them. The idea was to make a kind of “Trojan Goose” and, upon reaching the city, to pull the white beard costumes... [+]
I don't want people who don't know how to share the umbrella. I don't love the people who walk too fast when it's not me, nor the ones who walk too slowly (well, that's a little, but only a little). I don't like people sitting in the hallway seat on the bus. I don't like reckless... [+]
