My Eureka moment, as mentioned in my Centrism blog, may have arrived. The common ingredient of Anglo-Saxon countries is their English language (eg, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK, USA) . Suddenly, I remembered the articles on monolingualism and intelligence.
Some examples on the connection between monolingualism and intelligence:
- 2009 cognition study: On the bilingual advantage in conflict processing: now you see it, now you don’t
- JSTOR-2009: Bilingual Minds
- VOA Special English Health Report-2011: Are People Who Speak More Than One Language Smarter?
- New York Times-2012: Why Bilinguals Are Smarter
- Association for Psychological Science-2012: Why Bilinguals Are Smarter
- British Council-2014: Does being bilingual make you smarter?
- JSTOR-2015: Are bilingual people smarter than people who speak one language?
The essence is not intelligence in and of itself but it’s in this important quote:
“Bialystok argues that bilinguals are better at suppressing irrelevant or interfering information, because this is exactly what they have to do every day.”
JSTOR-2015: Are Bilingual People Smarter Than People Who Speak One Language?
Indeed, the trivialism of major American political discussions (eg, Hunter Biden) is mind-blowing to me and probably other mainland Europeans.
Moreover, the combination of arrogance and ignorance in bipartisan Anglo-Saxon countries is often shocking.
Big mainland European countries – like France, Germany and Spain – usually only speak their native language – apart from tourism regions. Smaller European countries often speak several languages. Switzerland has four official languages (ie, German, French, Italian, and Romansh).
Hence, I’m not entirely sure if the above is the sole explanation for the weirdness of Anglo-Saxon countries. I will continue digesting on this topic.
To be continued- or not.
“I feel pretty stupid that I don’t know any foreign languages. I took Latin and Greek in high school and got A’s and I guess it helps my vocabulary, but I wish I knew French or Arabic or Chinese. I keep hoping to get time to study one of these — probably French because it is the easiest.”
A 2015 quote by American businessman Bill Gates (b.1955)
Speak My Language (1998) by Inner Circle
band, lyrics, video, Wiki-band, Wiki-album+song
African hey, Jamaican hey
European hey, Australian hey
Africa, Swahili, Japan, Ichiban
Sending out a message to each and everyone
Note: all markings (bold, italic, underlining) by LO unless in quotes or stated otherwise.
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