0_Wizard
I find it cool that more people in the world are multilingual than monolingual.
It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population.
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Multilingualism
chosen_topic_0_Multilingualism
Monolingualism
Monoglottism (Greek μόνοσ "monos", "alone, solitary", + γλώττα "glotta", "tongue, language") or, more commonly, monolingualism or unilingualism, is the condition of being able to speak only a single language, as opposed to multilingualism. In a different context, "unilingualism" may refer to a language policy which enforces an official or national language over others. Being monolingual or unilingual is also said of a text, dictionary, or conversation written or conducted in only one language, and of an entity in which a single language is either used or officially recognized (in particular when being compared with bilingual or multilingual entities or in the presence of individuals speaking different languages).
Neuroscience of multilingualism
Various aspects of multilingualism have been studied in the field of neurology. These include the representation of different language systems in the brain, the effects of multilingualism on the brain's structural plasticity, aphasia in multilingual individuals, and bimodal bilinguals (people who can speak one sign language and one oral language). Neurological studies of multilingualism are carried out with functional neuroimaging, electrophysiology, and through observation of people who have suffered brain damage. The brain contains areas that are specialized to deal with language, located in the perisylvian cortex of the left hemisphere.
Multilingualism
Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a community of speakers. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. More than half of all Europeans claim to speak at least one language other than their mother tongue. Multilingualism is becoming a social phenomenon governed by the needs of globalization and cultural openness. Owing to the ease of access to information facilitated by the Internet, individuals' exposure to multiple languages is becoming increasingly frequent, thereby promoting a need to acquire additional languages.
Francization of Brussels
The Francization (or Francisation) of Brussels (, ) refers to the transformation of Brussels, Belgium, from a majority Dutch-speaking city to one that is bilingual or even multilingual, with French as both the majority language and lingua franca. Initially, the dominant aspect of this transition was the shift from Dutch to French among local Flemings in Brussels. This shift occurred over one or more generations, mirroring the advance of French elsewhere as a prestige language; subsequently, the dominance of French in Brussels has been further consolidated through internal migration of Francophone Walloons into the national capital, as well as by the immigration of non-Belgians, who either already spoke French or adopted it on arrival.
Cognitive advantages of bilingualism
A bilingual person can traditionally be defined as an individual who uses (understands and produces) two (or more) languages on a regular basis. A bilingual person's initial exposure to both languages may have started in early childhood, e.g. before age 3, but exposure may also begin later in life. While some people assume that bilinguals must be equally proficient in their languages, perfectly equal proficiency is rarely attested, and proficiency typically varies by domain. For example, a bilingual person may have greater proficiency for work-related terms in one language, and family-related terms in another language.
Intercultural bilingual education
Intercultural Bilingual Education "(Educación bilingüe intercultural)" is a language-planning model employed throughout Latin America in public education, and it arose as a political movement asserting space for indigenous languages and culture in the education system. IBE is designed to address the educational needs of indigenous communities, and consists of various bilingual curriculum designs. Since the late 20th century, IBE has become an important, more or less successful instrument of governmental language planning in several Latin American countries. These include bilingual education in Mayan languages in Guatemala, and , and Mayan in Mexico.
Simultaneous bilingualism
Simultaneous bilingualism is a form of bilingualism that takes place when a child becomes bilingual by learning two languages from birth. According to Annick De Houwer, in an article in "The Handbook of Child Language", simultaneous bilingualism takes place in "children who are regularly addressed in two spoken languages from before the age of two and who continue to be regularly addressed in those languages up until the final stages" of language development. Both languages are acquired as first languages. This is in contrast to sequential bilingualism, in which the second language is learned not as a native language but a foreign language.
1_Apprentice
I certainly wish I was able to speak more than one language.  What is the most popular language in the world, currently?
0_Wizard
I dont know about the entire world, but in the United States the most widely learned second language is Spanish.
Firstly, the languages being learned differ; in the United States, Spanish is the most popular language to be learned, whereas the most popular languages to be learned in Australia are Italian and Mandarin Chinese.
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Language education by region
partner_2_Language_education_by_region
English language
English is a West Germanic language that was first spoken in early medieval England and is now the third most widespread native language in the world, after Standard Chinese and Spanish, as well as the most widely spoken Germanic language. What is arguably the most striking characteristic of present-day English is that it is spoken by many more non-native speakers than native speakers, which is called "lingua franca" uses. This use of English as a Lingua Franca, which is a coincidental and unintentional result of English-speaking colonial spread, sets English apart from any other Western European language.
Second-language acquisition
Second-language acquisition (SLA), second-language learning, or L2 (language 2) acquisition, is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the scientific discipline devoted to studying that process. The field of second-language acquisition is a subdiscipline of applied linguistics, but also receives research attention from a variety of other disciplines, such as psychology and education. A central theme in SLA research is that of "interlanguage", the idea that the language that learners use is not simply the result of differences between the languages that they already know and the language that they are learning, but that it is a complete language system in its own right, with its own systematic rules.
American Sign Language
American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States and most of Anglophone Canada. Besides North America, dialects of ASL and ASL-based creoles are used in many countries around the world, including much of West Africa and parts of Southeast Asia. ASL is also widely learned as a second language, serving as a lingua franca. ASL is most closely related to French Sign Language (LSF). It has been proposed that ASL is a creole language of LSF, although ASL shows features atypical of creole languages, such as agglutinative morphology.
Multilingualism
Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a community of speakers. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolingual speakers in the world's population. More than half of all Europeans claim to speak at least one language other than their mother tongue. Multilingualism is becoming a social phenomenon governed by the needs of globalization and cultural openness. Owing to the ease of access to information facilitated by the Internet, individuals' exposure to multiple languages is becoming increasingly frequent, thereby promoting a need to acquire additional languages.
Foreign language
A foreign language is a language originally from another country. It is also a language not spoken in the native country of the person referred to, i.e., an English speaker living in Spain can say that Spanish is a foreign language to him or her. These two characterisations do not exhaust the possible definitions, however, and the label is occasionally applied in ways that are variously misleading or factually inaccurate. Some children learn more than one language from birth or from a very young age: they are bilingual or multilingual. These children can be said to have two, three or more mother tongues: neither language is foreign to that child, even if one language is a foreign language for the vast majority of people in the child's birth country.
Bilingual education
Bilingual education involves teaching academic content in two languages, in a native and secondary language with varying amounts of each language used in accordance with the program model. The following are several different types of bilingual education program models:  Dual Immersion classrooms encourage students but with the permission it may be enthusiastic &' native language development, making an important contribution to heritage language maintenance and allows language minority students to remain in classrooms with their native English-speaking peers, resulting in linguistic and sociocultural advantages (Christian, 1996b).
Spanish language
The Spanish language (; ), also called the Castilian language (, ), is a West Romance language that originated in the Castile region of Spain and today has hundreds of millions of native speakers around the world. It is usually considered the world's second-most spoken native language, after Mandarin Chinese. Spanish is a part of the Ibero-Romance group of languages, which evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in Iberia after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century. The oldest Latin texts with traces of Spanish come from mid-northern Iberia in the 9th century, and the first systematic written use of the language happened in Toledo, then capital of the Kingdom of Castile, in the 13th century.
1_Apprentice
Do you happen to know how many Americans can speak spanish as well as English?
0_Wizard
Well about 45 million people in the US speak Spanish, and about half of those say they speak English well, so around 20 million.
About half of all American Spanish speakers also assessed themselves as speaking English "very well" in the 2000 U.S. Census.
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Spanish language in the United States
partner_1_Spanish_language_in_the_United_States
Languages of the United States
Many languages are used, or historically have been used, in the United States. Over 500 languages are spoken by the U.S. population. The most commonly used language is English (specifically, American English), which is the de facto national language of the United States. Since the 1965 Immigration Act, Spanish is the second most common language in the country. The state government of Louisiana offers services and documents in French, as does New Mexico in Spanish. There are many languages indigenous to North America or to U.S. states or holdings in the Pacific region. Hawaiian, although having few native speakers, is an official language along with English of the state of Hawaii.
Hispanic and Latino Americans
Hispanic Americans and Latino Americans (; ) are people in the United States who are descendants of countries of Latin America and Spain. It is the largest population of Latino Americans and Hispanics outside of Latin America. More generally, it includes all persons in the United States who self-identify as Hispanic or Latino, whether of full or partial ancestry. For the 2010 United States Census, people counted as "Hispanic" or "Latino" were those who identified as one of the specific Hispanic or Latino categories listed on the census questionnaire ("Mexican," "Puerto Rican," or "Cuban") as well as those who indicated that they were "other Spanish, Hispanic, or Latino."
UEFA Financial Fair Play Regulations
The UEFA Financial Fair Play Regulations (FFP) were established to prevent professional football clubs spending more than they earn in the pursuit of success and in doing so getting into financial problems which might threaten their long-term survival. They were agreed to in principle in September 2009 by the Financial Control Panel of football’s governing body in Europe (Union of European Football Associations – UEFA). The regulations provide for sanctions to be taken against clubs who exceed spending, over several seasons, within a set budgetary framework. Implementation of the regulations took place at the outset of the 2011–12 football season.
History of France
The first written records for the history of France appear in the Iron Age. What is now France made up the bulk of the region known to the Romans as Gaul. Roman writers noted the presence of three main ethno-linguistic groups in the area: the Gauls, the Aquitani, and the Belgae. The Gauls, the largest and best attested group, were Celtic people speaking what is known as the Gaulish language. Over the course of the 1st millennium BC the Greeks, Romans and Carthaginians established colonies on the Mediterranean coast and the offshore islands. The Roman Republic annexed southern Gaul as the province of Gallia Narbonensis in the late 2nd century BC, and Roman forces under Julius Caesar conquered the rest of Gaul in the Gallic Wars of 58–51 BC.
Spanish language in the United States
Spanish is the second most spoken language in the United States of America. Forty-five million Hispanophones speak Spanish as their first, second or heritage language, and there are six million Spanish language students in the United States. This makes the United States the third-largest Hispanophone country in the world after Mexico and Colombia, and before Spain. Spanish has both the largest number of native language Romance speakers and native Indo-European language speakers in the world. About half of all American Spanish speakers also assessed themselves as speaking English "very well" in the 2000 U.S. Census.
Hispanophone
Hispanophone and Hispanosphere are terms used to refer to Spanish-language speakers and the Spanish-speaking world, respectively. The terms derive from the Latin political name of the Iberian Peninsula, Hispania. In addition to the general definition of Hispanophone, some groups in the Hispanic world make a distinction between Castilian-speaking and Spanish-speaking, with the former term denoting the speakers of the Spanish language—also known as Castilian—and the latter the speakers of the Spanish or Hispanic languages (i.e. the languages of Spain or the languages of the Hispanic nations). The present map has colored the Hispanosphere, composed of the currently Hispanophone (Spanish-speaking) geographic areas.
Spanish language
The Spanish language (; ), also called the Castilian language (, ), is a West Romance language that originated in the Castile region of Spain and today has hundreds of millions of native speakers around the world. It is usually considered the world's second-most spoken native language, after Mandarin Chinese. Spanish is a part of the Ibero-Romance group of languages, which evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in Iberia after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century. The oldest Latin texts with traces of Spanish come from mid-northern Iberia in the 9th century, and the first systematic written use of the language happened in Toledo, then capital of the Kingdom of Castile, in the 13th century.