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I hear it all the time from Americans. "Europeans speaks so many languages!" "The children are all fluent in three languages!""Everyone in Europe speaks English!"
Ok, compared to the United States, these statements are closer to true than to false. But they are still far from the reality. An often stated fact is that half of Europeans are bilingual, and for starters, we know that statistics are often manipulated to convey what we want. As far as I can tell, this comes from an Associated Press article "U.S.A. Way Behind: half of Europe's Citizens Know 2 Languages" (2009), but I could not find the original article online. However, it states that the most "bilingual" country is Luxemburg, in which 99% of the population is bilingual. While this is true, we should keep in mind that it is a country 2/3rds the size of Rhode Island (less than twice the size of D.C.) with three national languages bordering three different countries. So, yes, it is pretty damn necessary for them to speak something other than just Luxembourgish, a language similar to the neighboring dialects in northern Germany.
Bilingualism or multilingualism can mean many things. It can mean speaking several of the national languages of your country, it can mean speaking the main language and a dialect, or it can mean speaking a language you learned in school. At least, these are the most common situations to which it refers.
For the sake of my argument, I am going to examine learned multilingualism. Not being an exception who had separate languages at school and at home, not someone who had multilingual parents or anything. Just someone who started studying a language in school, for example, a few times a week. Now, in this case, let's look at some of the factor's allowing Europeans to be more succesfull at multilingualism than Americans.
First of all, it is a continent of dialects. Even though these dialects are dying out and often have a negative stigma to them (much like African American Vernacular English, i.e. Ebonics), they are still relatively prominent in Europe, as are separate languages that are often viewed as dialects. And when someone grows up speaking a dialect alongside a main language, they have a head start in the world of languages, because their brains are fairly used to the concept of having more than one languages, which is a big start.
Second of all, there are small countries with their own languages, such as the scandanavian countries. Being in the north, there are often cheap flights in the winter, and it is green and beautiful in the summer. Europeans flock to these countries in droves, and yet few people bother to learn their languages, because they often opt for languages that are more widely spoken, such as English, German and French. The people in these countries therefor not only need to learn to communicate in the languages of the tourists, but they also (perhaps more importantly) have ample opportunity, because they are constantly practicing with those droves of tourists.
Which brings us to a third factor: Europeans get to practice. They get to fly over to other countries and practice a new language. Weekend trips are often quite common, and round-trip tickets usually range from €20 to €200 ($28-$280), which can make a 3 or 4 day weekend well worth it. You get to immerse yourself in a new culture, albeit shortly, and put all that language learning to use. And when you are not doing that, they might run into these tourists in thier cities in towns, or in their nearby mutual destinations.
And my final factor? Social networking, communication and making friends. Now this is where English comes in quite handy. It is often a lingua franca for backpackers; just look at Couchsurfing. Though you can clearly state your languages (I think 6 is the max, though) as well as the level, the majority of the reviews, profiles and information is in English. This means that if you want to try to stay with someone in another country, chances are, you are going to try to speak English with them. And if you try, you practice. And if you practice, you improve. Same thing goes for those tourists you met and befriended on Facebook in the hopes that when you visited them in their own countries you will be able to crash on their sofas.
I know that I did not mention the educational system as a reason, and it is true that most Europeans start at a younger age. Often it is in middle-school or even grade school that people learn a first foreign language, and then they start a second in high school. However, I have met plenty of people who studied English or German or whatever for 6 years or more, and yet have forgotten everything. Now, if they ever chose to re-learn it, it will be much easier, because we can resurrect that forgotten language fairly easily when we return to study it. But it takes a lot if work and motivation to study a language on our own after college or even beyond high school, and these languages often remain forgotten in our pasts.
Anyway, this is all speculation and opinion from an American living in Europe, who finds herself speaking other languages far more often than she finds people speaking her own. But I do know that I was disappointed in America by the lack of opportunity to practice a foreign language. Mexico and Quebec were both quite far, and they were accomodating to tourists and so used to accomodating non-spanish or non-french speakers that they would usually simply respond in English.
We can't learn all the languages in the world, but we can learn languages, and the more we learn, the more likely we are to be able to communicate with people who are also multilingual. Though the lack of practice makes it hard, we are on the edge of an internet-era that is going to make it much easier to find new ways to practice and make friends across the world via video chatting. One of these days, America, you, too, will be multilingual.
