Majority of the world speaks a single language or two at most. Shit half the people I see online can’t even speak one.
It makes sense you when you look at it like that. most people in ESL programs only speak a single language, if you speak more than two you probably don’t need ESL classes and can learn on your own.
I think anyone in India and Africa speaks 4 languages easily.
their regional language (i.e. Masaai, Yoruba, Xhosa)
the over-regional language (Arabic, Swahili)
a coloniser language (English, French)
and possibly just enough of a neighbouring regional language
I think many Chinese people are also bilingual (i.e. Wu+ always mandarin). They often learn another language in school (English or something geographically closer, like Korean).
Well, if you add up the number of speakers of second languages according to this page, and assume anybody speaks at least one language as their first one, you’ll end up with almost exactly 1.4 as the average number of languages any given human speaks.
That’s the lower bound, though, as I only added up second languages where the number of speakers is at least one million, and Wikipedia doesn’t list many more anyway.
Majority of the world speaks a single language or two at most. Shit half the people I see online can’t even speak one.
It makes sense you when you look at it like that. most people in ESL programs only speak a single language, if you speak more than two you probably don’t need ESL classes and can learn on your own.
I think anyone in India and Africa speaks 4 languages easily.
I think many Chinese people are also bilingual (i.e. Wu+ always mandarin). They often learn another language in school (English or something geographically closer, like Korean).
Well, if you add up the number of speakers of second languages according to this page, and assume anybody speaks at least one language as their first one, you’ll end up with almost exactly 1.4 as the average number of languages any given human speaks.
That’s the lower bound, though, as I only added up second languages where the number of speakers is at least one million, and Wikipedia doesn’t list many more anyway.