Post 1800, if English isn't the global lingua franca, how good are Americans at learning languages?

Currently, Americans can be generally bad at learning languages, since they rarely not have to speak English, as everybody else learns it for them. This appears to be the same for all of the Anglosphere, in that they are generally reluctant to learn to speak fluently other languages. So say French is the global lingua franca, and English isn't ,for various reasons not central to this question. With this alternate lingua franca, how would American English skills be like vs OTL?
 
They would be better in general, but the geographic isolation of the United States would still mean that many people would be monolingual.
 
Foreign language skills would be somewhat better. However since the US is big enough that it would still dominate the continent unless there is a POD before 1830 or so there still would be less need of it than say Italy. An Italian will more likely to speak German than an American learn another language simply to trade with Germany. Due to its sheer size the US economy has historically much more domestically driven. We don't need to trade with Germany for iron or coal. We have iron and coal. We don't have to trade with France for wood, we have wood or practically anything else you can name. Russia is like this as well .
 
What the posters above said. So one way to achieve a US where Americans are better at (i.e. more exposed to) other languages, is to create a more linguistically diverse US. Have larger Spanish- and French-speaking regions, for example, or much earlier (like early 19th c.) massive immigration from non-Anglophone Europe where the immigrants end up in roughly equal numbers to the locally-born English-speaking population.
 
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Well, before WWI there plenty of multilingual Americans who spoke German/Italian/etc at home as their primary language for generations on end and had no problem switching between their languages and English.

I suspect in a world where English doesn't not become the dominant Lingua Franca, Americans would do just fine switching around given there is more incentive to do so.
 
I can see more Americans being proficient in French if it's either the Ancien Regime or Napoleon who stops the Brits from spreading English everywhere.

Imagine Quebcois linguistic snobbishness the size of half a continent though...:eek:
 
What the posters above said. So one way to achieve a US where Americans are better at (i.e. more exposed to) other languages, is to create a more linguistically diverse US. Have larger Spanish- and French-speaking regions, for example, or much earlier (like early 19th c.) massive immigration from non-Anglophone Europe where the immigrants end up in roughly equal numbers to the locally-born English-speaking population.


This was analogous to my earlier post on the early addition of Louisiane and Québec to America. It combines with the migration from Haiti and further francophone migrants and assimilation, you have a good 20% of the US that uses French as a first language.
 

WhoMadeWho

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Still bad, because we're geographically isolated and basically guaranteed to be the most powerful nation on the continent by miles.
 
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