I think every country needs to have a mandatory bilingual policy (hexbear.net)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by Lemmygradwontallowme@hexbear.net to c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net

97 comments fedilink hide all child comments

In short: By the time a person is 18, they must effectively be able to communicate and understand conversationally in 2 languages and casually use them in daily life..., if not become completely fluent...

Other than that, any language goes (whether it is a locally-known one, or a popular one worldwide),

The only thing I hope to gain from this, is to rid the world of /Monolingual Betas/

Seriously though, has this been a policy before? Because I haven't heard of such one...

I think this can especially be used for citizenship...

Edit: I don't necessarily have any other presupposed requirements besides bilingualism, though we may have certain notions of such in this main goal

Edit II: In furthering this venture, I have realized that my liberalism may slightly poisoned my lens....

And for clarification...

Minimum dual language system:

Main national language + other language (likely another related language, but foreign ones are fine)

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] infuziSporg@hexbear.net 4 points 1 year ago

Maybe 100 years from now we'll have the global coordination needed to make stuff like that a reality.

Until then, I think it's a lot more useful to have "regional languages". Between Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Mandarin, Hindi, and Malay, over 3/4 of Asia speaks one of these, and roughly half of Asia speaks one of them natively. Add Japanese, Vietnamese, and Thai, and you reach perhaps 90% L1 or L2. Interestingly enough, only 2 of these 9 languages share a language family.

4 languages make up >95% of the L1s in the Western Hemisphere, and these carry over to Africa to make up probably at least 60% of people at L2.

Perhaps a controversial position would be that groups of endangered or smaller languages could maintain a better guaranteed existence by coalescing around one of them as a lingua franca, and possibly having better prospects of outsiders learning that language too.