I’d be fine with “no US politics”. It’s so annoying that !politics@lemmy.world is specifically and only about US politics. Because apparently, US politics are the only politics relevant for the world.

Yeah, that’s totally true. If you speak Serbian and you move to the Netherlands, nobody would (or could) switch to Serbian for you.

That’s why I said, everyone needs (or has incentive to) learn the global lingua franca, the regional lingua franca, the language of the country they live in and their mother tongue.

As someone from the UK living in the Netherlands, these four languages are English, English, Dutch and English, so you’ll likely learn (at least to some degree) two languages.

If you are from the UK and stay in the UK, all four languages are English and thus you likely won’t have a need to ever get to fluency in a second language.

(Of course, there are some special circumstances, e.g. if you are from the UK and live in the UK but work as a French teacher, you do have a need to know French, but I’m talking about the general case.)

If you are an immigrant in a country with a low-tier language, e.g. a Rumanian living in Albania, the four languages will be English, Russian, Albanian, Romanian.

Speaking multiple languages is a thing because you need it.

Everyone needs to know English, because its the global Lingua Franca. Not only to speak with native English speakers but to speak with everyone. If as an Austrian I speak to someone from China, I will do so in English.

Everyone needs to know the local Lingua Franca, because it’s a massive career help and you will need it quite commonly. That’s why most people in Hungary learn German. They need that all the time, since the economies are tied so closely together.

Everyone needs to learn the language of the country they live in, because only if you know the language you can access the job market and all services without barrier.

Lastly, everyone needs to learn their mother tongue to be able to speak with their family.

If you are from Serbia and move to the Czech Republic, you will learn and frequently use four languages.

If you are from Germany and stay there, you will learn and frequently use two languages.

If you are from the US and stay there, English is the global Lingua Franca, the local Lingua Franca, the language of the country you live in and your mother tongue, and thus you will likely never learn a second language to fluency levels.

I can speak English quite well.

That’s because of the “language tiers”.

People don’t usually learn languages for fun, at least not to a point where they can actually speak it fluently. They learn it because they have an use for it. If you learn a language without having an use for it, you lose it quite quickly.

The highest tier language is the worldwide lingua franca: English. You learn English to talk to anyone, not to talk to English native speakers. For example, my company (a central European one) uses English as the work language. We don’t have a single English native speaker on the team. But if I want to talk to a colleague from Rumania, Egypt, Spain or the Netherlands I will talk English with them.

The next tier is the regional lingua franca. That’s e.g. Spanish, French, German, Mandarin, Russian or Arabic (and likely a few others, I don’t know the whole world). These languages are spoken in certain regions and can be used to communicate with people from neighbouring countries. You can get around with e.g. German in Hungary, because most Hungarians learn German. It’s also sometimes necessary since TV, books or other media might not be available in the local language. For example, a lot of Albanians speak Italian, because TV shows and movies are rarely translated into Albanian and instead broadcast in Italian. (Also, since Italy was so close, many people watched Italian TV while Albania had communism.)

The lowest tier are local languages. These are languages that are only spoken in their own country. For example: Rumanian, Serbian, Hungarian, Welsh, Gaelic, Dutch and so on. People speak these languages because they live in that country. For someone who doesn’t live in that country, there’s rarely any major benefit to learning these languages.

In general, people only really learn to speak languages that are on the same tier or higher.

If you live in Albania, you learn Albanian as a child, then probably add Italian to understand TV. In school you will learn English and once you go online you will use it. You might also learn Russian to be able to communicate with people in nearby countries and if you are from the muslim part of Albania you might also learn Arabic.

If you live in Germany, you’d just learn German and English. No need for any other languages. If you spend some significant time in France, Spain or Italy, you might pick up one of these languages.

If you live in the US or GB, you start with English, and there’s hardly any point to learn anything else. By default you can already communicate with everyone, read everything on the internet and watch all TV shows and movies (pretty much everything is translated into English, if it isn’t even refilmed in English). If you try to learn another language and try to use it with native speakers of said language, chances are pretty high they just switch over to English.

I don’t have one in English, but I have some in German for those who understand.

My Granddad had a female coworker that was higher in rank than him. He would always greet her with “Meine Allerwerteste”. It’s a word play because “Meine Werteste” is equivalent to a very formal version of “my dear”. “Aller” is a superlative form, so basically “My very dearest”. But “Mein Allerwertester” (so the male form of what he used) means “my ass”.

The other one is to use terminology like “Er versucht immer sein Bestes zu geben” (“He always tries to give his best”). In Austria, you are legally allowed to ask for a work testimony from your employer when you are looking for a new job. There is some legislation that prohibits negative speech in these work testimonies so that your employer cannot make you look bad in front of your potential new employer (which makes the whole concept pretty useless, but it is what it is). So to get around that, employers adopted a kind of “secret” code where e.g. “tries to” means “fails to”. So you can use the same kind of terminology to deliver something that sounds like a compliment, but for everyone in the know (which is most people by now) it’s clear that you deeply offended the person you are talking about.