The thing that's ignored in most discussions about language learning in different cultures is that language skills reflect economic necessity, not culturedness.

The thing that's ignored in most discussions about language learning in different cultures is that language skills reflect economic necessity, not culturedness. In Europe, where there's a smattering of mutually incomprehensible languages in a relatively small geographic space, trade requires the emergence of common languages. Greek, Latin, French and now English have each had their go at that role. You see the same in many third world countries where there are local language, national languages and international languages (i.e. Punjabi / Hindi / English). The US is the seat of the modern lingua franca, the world's largest economy and relatively linguistically isolated since most of the continent speaks the same language. As such there's a negligible amount of pressure to learn additional languages and, well, people don't.