I mean the whole school I went through kept nailing in our heads how much a foreign language would benefit you. I guess this went under the noses of whoever like teaching kids to balance a checkbook.
I mean the whole school I went through kept nailing in our heads how much a foreign language would benefit you. I guess this went under the noses of whoever like teaching kids to balance a checkbook.
It hasn’t really been an economic necessity or cultural priority like other countries.
Most countries who have a population who speak more than one language usually either have a variety of languages spoken within/near the country or rely on ESL speakers to participate in the international workforce.
With English being the current lingua franca, Americans already know the current dominant language. There is really only one major language which is relevant to neighbors, but Americans are usually in the more dominant economic position and there is a cultural aversion to adopting Spanish more.
This is the correct answer.
If you live in SE Asia for example you speak your local language at home but you need to learn English for work.
If you already speak English at home then you already know how to speak English at work.
French Canadians would like to have a word with you
They could, if they were economically relevant on the continent. Spanish and Portuguese are far more relevant when interfacing with international trade in the Western Hemisphere.
I pointed out cultural reasons for maintaining a language as well. The USA, as a country, has no current cultural reason to have portions of the country maintain a different language.
Is Canada not economically relevant to the continent? French is an official language of Canada, on equal footing as English. By law anything sold in Canada must include both English and French labelling, software, instruction manuals etc. For parts of the US that trade a lot with Canada, French is at least as economically relevant as Spanish.
Quebec isn’t Canada.
Having to get documents translated is a cost of doing business in Canada. You don’t have to speak both languages to conduct business in Canada.
Quebec is in Canada, it’s also not the only Francophone region in Canada. There are also most certainly major economic zones in Canada where you would need to know French to conduct business. And I assume you could also hire a translator for Spanish, no?
But we’re talking about economic utility. Quebec isn’t Canada; it is much smaller.
In contrast, Mexico has a GDP near Canada as a whole and there isn’t a bilingual legal framework to support business deals. Furthermore, there are more Spanish speaking countries to make deals with in the Western Hemisphere; the closest that French has is Haiti.
Quebec is one of the most economically active regions in Canada. But we can out that aside for now because, again, Quebec is not the only francophone region in Canada. The province I’m from doesn’t even recognize French as an official language, yet there are people who live here who are born here, are educated here, and work here, and die here, all without ever achieving more that basic English proficiency because they are so immersed in the Francophone subculture here.
So if what you are worried about is legal frameworks, then yes, you don’t need your lawyer to be bilingual to do business with Canada in some cases. But that doesn’t diminish the fact that the people who you hope to do business with, and your potential customer base, might not know anything beyond broken English (if they know any English at all).
But if you’re looking at an American choosing a language based on potential job opportunities, Spanish is likely going to offer far more upside than French unless that American has certain ties which would make French more relevant to them. For large parts of the USA, knowing Spanish will be more locally relevant than knowing French.
It isn’t saying that French is a bad language for Americans to learn, but that most of the country would likely see Spanish as more economically useful.