[notpushkin]

> 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.

[MobiusHorizons]

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.

[metalman]

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