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Better than Bilingual

In the New York Times I found…

“But if being bilingual is good, what about being trilingual, as so many people in India are? Or even quadrilingual?

“That’s hardly unusual in India, where someone may, speak, say, Punjabi and Hindi with their father’s family, Bengali with their mother’s and Hindi and English with their spouse and children. India’s 2001 census lists 122 languages, and bi- or trilingualism is so assumed that the census questionnaires ask respondents for their first, second and third languages.
“Almost 20 percent of India’s population, some 240 million people, is multilingual, and millions are trilingual. (Sri Lanka, meanwhile, has proclaimed 2012 the “Year for a Trilingual Sri Lanka.”)”

So, what about that!  Can you imagine that happening in the United States where we have a candidate telling the people of Puerto Rico that they need to learn English?  I long for the day when bilingual is so common that to be special you need to be trilingual.

Me?  I am only bilingual.  Me parece un buen principio.  Después tendré que aprender Quechua o Aymara.

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