Originally posted by Soledad
It is not too much to expect that a country be bilingual for the most part.
,unless some of it's citizens don't have the time or resources to learn the second language, because of their work or family obligations. In America, which would we choose to be the second language anyway? There are so many different people here that want their language equally represented and understood. Soledad, your family would have liked for Americans to speak the native language of the country they came from as the second language, but what about all the other immigrants to this country? If it's not too much to expect a country to be bilingual, then the country your family came from would have been bilingual, and they would have learned two languages before they got here. The question is, which two? The fact that America is not bilingual is not so much due to exclusivity and ignorance as it is to the impossibility of narrowing it down to one second language. I don't know why English is the "backup" language in so many other countries; could it be because of the wide range of the British Empire way back when? I'm not so jingoistic as to think that it's because of us Americans, that we have demanded to be accommodated globally.

Twisterdog, I agree with you on your entire post, especially on the tourism aspect - they have some of the world's most famous art treasures in the Louvre, attracting visitors from all over the globe, and yet the signs there were exclusively in French. I think in this country we try to accommodate other languages as far as multilingual or international symbol-type signs at major tourist attractions.
Oh well - my fault for not learning French, I guess. (Actually, I took 2 years of Spanish in junior high, but I didn't retain too much of the information - I never had a chance to use it much.)