> of the languages spoken by five million people or more within a thousand miles or so of where you live, what percentage do you know

By that metric you shouldn't feel bad for not speaking Russian in most of Russia, or for not knowing the most common languages in your immediate surroundings in large swaths of Africa (i.e. most Bantu languages would be excluded).

The essay is a bit tongue in cheek, but I think that was basically the point.

> of the languages spoken by five million people or more within a thousand miles or so of where you live, what percentage do you know?

IRL interactions are just one aspect of life. Pretty important, sure, but it’s not the only important thing.

Lots of the heavily multilingual people in the world also have a lot of irl interactions that necessitate knowing languages other than their mother tongue. Of course that’s not the only reason to learn languages, but it is both common and effective. So in terms of expected number of languages spoken I think it’s a good baseline.

In the case of the US the languages that would meet that criteria in most parts of the country would be English and Spanish. But there are also hierarchies around languages, ie people that speak the more dominant languages are less likely to speak the less dominant languages, but the speakers of the less dominant languages are expected to speak the more dominant languages and suffer higher consequences if they don’t.

and the joke about the heavily multilingual people is that they will speak 9 languages,none of them fluently

I prefer to view it as "what's the likelihood that, with your current knowledge of languages, you're able to communicate with any person you may presumably want to speak to in the future."

This is why it's so much easier to only speak English than it is to only speak another language.

> This is why it's so much easier to only speak English than it is to only speak another language.

It’s pretty easy to only speak German within the DACH countries. Huge online communities as well that speak German.

I’d wager it’s similar for several other large languages, e.g. Spanish or Chinese, OTOH they are even larger, OTOH they probably don’t have the same advanced dubbing industry that we have.

I am Spanish; we have a very strong dubbing industry and pretty much all movies have been dubbed since forever. In fact nowadays we usually get two dubs, one for Spain and one for LATAM, with serious online fights about which one is better xD

Oh interesting, I heard that it’s almost never the case that people are so attached to dubs as here, where people often don’t really care about the original voices and instead about the dubbers, which might even get movie billing.

> one for Spain and one for LATAM

What’s the difference there for someone who is only bilingual (English and German)? :D

There's a bit of variety in the vocabulary used between LATAM and Spain, and honestly even between LATAM countries there's variance.

An example that comes to mind, as a first year Spanish student (I'm doing my best but fact check me because I'm very much still learning!) with a Latin wife, is "el carro," which means car, and is common in some Spanish speaking countries but others might use "el coche" -- I believe this dialectic difference even exists within Latin American Spanish speaking countries!

There are differences in pronunciation too but that obviously doesn't apply to subtitles

Regarding "car", there is a third option: "auto", which if I am not mistaken, is the preferred word in the Southern Cone.

But yes, it is mostly a difference of vocabulary, accent and pronunciation, and also how or if to translate the names of characters and the movies themselves.

As a Southern Conesman, can confirm.