SANTA MARIA, Calif. -- English is without a doubt the world's lingua franca. It's spoken by more than 400 million people as their native tongue and many others speak it as their second language.
One would think that English by itself would be enough to make it in the world, given the importance of Shakespeare's tongue. Yet, the events of 9/11 clearly demonstrated that in a perilous world, monolingualism is also very dangerous.
Soon after 9/11, for example, it was revealed that government officials had collected huge amounts of data, which was not analyzed because of limited linguistic resources.