Wrong! I remember a girl in high school saying if she visited a foreign country, she’d expect the locals to speak English. That was in the early 1980’s, but I find things haven’t changed much. Some Americans seem to possess a certain degree of arrogance when it comes to linguistics; they feel everyone around the world should speak English. It doesn’t help that former Harvard professor Lawrence Summers opines in a recent New York Times essay that foreign language instruction in the U.S. is moot. Polyglots must love to make fun of us! English may have become an international standard, but Americans are isolating themselves if they think their own culture is so superior they can afford to be monolingual.
Chief Writing Wolf 