Everyone who speaks English as a first language should try to learn a second language.

Hello to you Dappleshade, and hello to other readers. I thank you all for your time and I will try to make good use of it. First of all, I know it will be automatic for many of you to feel dissatisfied with the con position in this argument because English may not be your first language or because your life has personally benefited from the knowledge and use of other languages. As a speaker and reader of several languages myself, I am thoroughly sympathetic to this point of view. So why, you ask, if I have bothered to learn other languages, would I argue against the very thing? The reasons are several, and I will begin my half of the debate by elaborating on some of them here. It will be helpful for you to understand my own motivation for learning more than one language myself. My first solid exposure to a second language was French, which I studied for several years in elementary school and again in high school, mostly because it was one of the few languages available to me and because girls found it romantic, lol. I never quite became fluent in it, but I am conversational. In college I took Italian until I was fluent, as I am Italian and thought it a fitting study of heritage, and also Bengali and Hindi when I met an Indian girl that I was enamoured with for the next decade. I am not verbally fluent in either of the latter two, but I am conversational and have learned to read and write both scripts because of an interest in India's rich philosophical and literary culture. I also developed curiosities for Latin and Brahmi, as I am fond of ancient histories and they are the historical antecedents to the Italian and Bengali that I was already learning. Finally, I have been learning Japanese simply from watching lots of anime shows for so many years, and I have tried to learn some Mandarin but have honestly found it quite difficult compared to the other languages I have studied. You can tell from my introduction that I am not against learning more than one language because I have intolerance or ignorance of the subject. On the contrary, I am a curious explorer of world cultures and a fervent proponent of open communication between all its peoples. And therein lies my real motivation for opposing the idea of learning more than one language - communication. The fact that I am against learning a language other than English is only a result of its current scientific, legal and multi-national significance. I actually have no preference for English itself, as I think there are other languages more pleasing to the eyes and ears. Had we debated the topic in another age, I might have been a proponent of Arabic or Sanskrit. But right now, English is the primary language of education and commerce around the world (sources backing this assertion are sprinkled throughout the following paragraphs). After checking many sources for the number of languages currently in existence, I found that almost every one of them ends up citing ethnologue.com and its current figure of 6,909 individual dialects (1). You read that right, there are nearly seven thousand languages currently in existence, roughly one per million of us. The way humans learn right now, no one would ever be able to master enough languages to be able to communicate with even a simple majority of the world's population. The most common native language is Mandarin, so you might think I would argue for learning that, but it's geographic distribution is vastly ethnocentric to China, and has relatively little permeation into the rest of the world, as compared to English (2). Figures on the total number of English speakers vary widely according to source, but generally range from around 500 million to nearly 2 billion, eclipsing Mandarin as the most spoken language when including non-native speakers, which is very important because it highlights the penetration of the English language into other countries around the world (3). In fact, over 50 countries use English as an official or de facto language, compared to only three for Mandarin (4, 5). Moreover, Mandarin is a Sino-Tibetan language, whereas 6 of the next 7 most common languages in the world are Indo-European (7). One of the primary difficulties to learning a language is its similarity to your own, so it would be far more laborious for the rest of the world to learn Mandarin than for the Chinese to learn English. But so what? Just because one is more popular doesn't mean we shouldn't learn another, right? Well, I think 'wrong,' and here's why. We are in the information age, and humans are engaged in a losing battle with information overload. It has been asserted by quite a few studies that humans are approaching the limit of their intellectual capacity (6). We can't just keep cramming more information into our skulls without figuring out some way to do it more efficiently and effectively, which means that learning additionally languages is currently at the expense of other learning. My introductory argument has become long-winded and I do not wish to alienate the readers with my verbosity, so I will save the rest of it for my next round. There, I will elaborate on the prevalence of English in literature and on the internet (our greatest tool of communication since the printing press, also coincidentally invented in an English-speaking country). I will also comment on why current progress with translation programs will soon make it entirely unnecessary to speak the same language in order to communicate, and why we will get to that point faster if we don't spend our time learning other languages in the interim. 1. http://www.ethnologue.com... 2. http://www.ethnologue.com... 3. http://en.wikipedia.org... 4. http://en.wikipedia.org... 5 http://wiki.answers.com... 6. http://www.dailymail.co.uk... 7. http://en.wikipedia.org...