One night, I ate at Pyongyang, a North Korean restaurant. There are 130 of these, but most are in China, with none outside Asia. The attraction is not the food, but the performing waitresses. They play instruments, sing and dance. The drummer was trying to channel Neil Peart, I'm sure. Drawing the loudest applause of the night, a beauty balanced a heavy jar on her head and spun around, I don't know, thirty times? Wowed diners handed her seven plastic bouquets, available from the house for a fee. For one number, they actually sang "You Raise Me Up," so even Kim Jong-un, one of America's favorite villains, is instructing his women to sing in English. Depending on who came in, a waitress would speak in Cambodian, Chinese, English or, of course, Korean.
The point here is not that Cambodians, or anyone else, are linguistic geniuses, but as soon as you step outside the US, you'll find many people who are quite eager to learn at least one foreign language, English, with some capable of acquiring one, two or three more, even in countries with embarrassingly low IQ. Even when they fail, the effort alone sharpens their minds and widens their orientation.
Since Americans already know English, so to speak, most don't feel the need to bother with any language. Just hanging out and texting, they've mastered valley girl, Ebonics, death metal, double-wide or snark in ALL CAPS. Why think outside the continent-sized box when you're already inside the belly of the beast?
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