In short: By the time a person is 18, they must effectively be able to communicate and understand conversationally in 2 languages and casually use them in daily life…, if not become completely fluent…
Other than that, any language goes (whether it is a locally-known one, or a popular one worldwide),
The only thing I hope to gain from this, is to rid the world of /Monolingual Betas/
Seriously though, has this been a policy before? Because I haven’t heard of such one…
I think this can especially be used for citizenship…
Edit: I don’t necessarily have any other presupposed requirements besides bilingualism, though we may have certain notions of such in this main goal
Edit II: In furthering this venture, I have realized that my liberalism may slightly poisoned my lens…
And for clarification…
Minimum dual language system:
Main national language + other language (likely another related language, but foreign ones are fine)
I’ll be shocked if burgerland isn’t the only country in the global north where people only speak one language.
Typical American exceptionalism, acting like the UK isn’t just as stuck up about English.
Does Japan count? They’re pretty monolingual.
I would count them, foreign language classes (so basically English) are mandatory in Japanese schools, but I doubt many Japanese people speak other languages well.
I’d love to have some actual data for this, but searching mostly just brings up results for the Japanese language test for foreigners.
From anecdotal experience being in Japan, it’s very rare to meet someone who can casually communicate in English unless it’s part of their job or they’ve studied abroad. English in schools is mandatory as a class, but it only seems enough to remember basic phrases rather than imparting full fluency. I’d compare it to how Americans in high school will often study Spanish or French, then remember none of it.
That’s because memorizing a dictionary isn’t the same thing as learning a language, and memorizing a thousand different grammatical rules doesn’t really help you at all. You’re basically translating every time you speak the other language and spend half your mental faculties trying to figure out how the words go together. There’s no intuitiveness.
It’s an exhausting way to learn and at the end of the day the best case scenario is you’re a walking dictionary. Obviously you can’t remember all of that forever if you’re not constantly using it.
The vast majority of American language classes is just rote memorization.