We treasure the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Facts About Americans: We know our rights.

You don’t have to watch the news for very long before hearing about someone claiming their rights were violated when they were arrested for protesting, or some religious group suing the government because it had violated their right to the first amendment.

There’s a reason we, as Americans, hold the Bill of Rights very dear to our hearts; mostly because of how significant it is. The first amendment gives us the freedom of speech, religion and other very important rights, which are all extremely important to American culture.

7. Monolingualism is expected and assumed.

Facts About Americans: We only speak American.

America, without question, has a very diverse population and the United States has no official language at the federal level (English is the de facto language), but that doesn’t mean we are, or expect others to be bilingual. To me, this is one of the saddest things about American culture because I have a very high regard for different languages.

Whenever an American travels to Europe, the subject of language can be rather embarrassing because the average European knows 26 different languages, while the average American knows just 1. Ok, ok that was an exaggeration, it’s actually about 2, but still; that’s more than the average American! A whopping 81% of Americans only speak English at home (2000 Census) and 97% of Americans speak English well.

In our defense, we don’t have countries surrounding us on all sides (like many European countries do) and English has become the world’s language, so we don’t have much incentive to learn other languages. When 1 out of 5 people on Earth are able to speak English (at some level of competence), then it’s hard to see the urgent need to take the time to learn a second language.

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 1404