America---that glorious symbol of multiculturalism, the great melting pot---qualifies as part of the developed world, right? Not quite, if we consider the state of second language learning in schools across the country. According to a 2018 study, Europe often tops the U.S. in foreign language education in school. 92% of European students are learning a foreign language in school. In America it’s only 20%. In more than 20 European countries, studying a foreign language for at least one year is compulsory. In comparison, only 10 states and D.C. require learning a foreign language for graduation.

I went to a public school in Pennsylvania that ranked on Newsweek’s list of America’s top high schools in 2015. Foreign language learning was not a graduation requirement. A common response to such stories and statistics is: So what? Why should Americans care about learning another language when English has recently seemed to dominate as the official language of the world?

The world is globalizing faster than we can imagine. More than half of the world’s population speaks more than one language. It is also increasingly becoming the need for success in this globalizing world. Having the ability to speak a second language opens up the possibility of travelling and immersing yourself in another part of the world. This means people can feel other cultures, and traditions in places you were previously kept away because you could not communicate in the language.

The teaching of foreign languages can be instrumental in bringing about peace and unity in the country we live in. Learning a second language can be an efficient vehicle to help to bridge communities. To speak another language means having access to a universe of different experiences and world views of another community of people.

Koko the gorilla knew over 1,000 signs based on American Sign Language, and used them to do everything from asking for food to joking around. Her trainer and long-term companion, Penny Patterson, thought Koko went further still, signing in novel ways and showing complex emotions. According to Ms Patterson, when a cat that Koko loved was killed in an accident, Koko signed: “Cat, cry, have-sorry, Koko-love.” When Koko died last month, some of her obituaries (讣告) mourned the gorilla who had “mastered American sign language.”

Then came the backlash, from linguists and experts in sign languages. Sign languages have complex grammars, equivalent to spoken tongues in expressiveness. Koko’s ability, it was pointed out, fell well short of a fluent human signer. Moreover, Ms Patterson was her interpreter, a role that invited the question of how much she was inferring what Koko “must have meant,” and explaining away random signs. It was hard to be sure: Ms Patterson preferred speaking to journalists over sharing her video and raw data about Koko with fellow researchers.

There is no doubt that animals communicate. Animals from one region can share sounds that differ from groups in another, leading researchers to talk of animal “dialects.” Then there are the remarkable achievements of Koko and her primate predecessors, including a chimp delightfully named Nim Chimpsky. Yet there is an important distinction between communication and language. Take the misleading term “body language.” It is sometimes claimed that words convey just 7% of meaning, and that body language and tone of voice do the rest. This wildly overstretches an old study which found that most emotional messaging — as opposed to the propositional kind — comes from tone and body language, especially when a neutral word such as “maybe” was used. But try conveying a fact like “It will rain on Tuesday” with your eyebrows, and the difference becomes clear. Language allows for clear statements, questions and commands.

Nim Chimpsky’s near-namesake, Noam Chomsky, has argued that people have a kind of “universal grammar”, and that all humankind’s languages are mere variations on a theme. Mr Chomsky has changed his mind repeatedly on what constitutes the core of human language, but one obvious candidate is syntax — rules, not just words, which allow the construction of a huge variety of meaningful utterances (所说的话). This capacity may even be infinite. Any statement in English, for example, can be made longer by adding “He said that …” at the beginning. This property is called recursion: a simple statement (“It’s cold”) is embedded in a more complicated one (“He said that it’s cold”). Human syntax also allows for hypotheticals (“If she hadn’t arrived …”), talking precisely about events distant from the present, and so much more.

That gorillas lack syntax should not blind humans to their magnificence. But the fact that Koko could communicate should not mislead observers into thinking she possessed language.

When I was sixteen years old, I made my first visit to the United States. It wasn’t the first time I had been abroad. Like most English children I learned French at school. And I had often been to France, so I was used to speaking a foreign language to people who didn’t understand English. But when I went to America, I was really looking forward to having a nice easy holiday without any language barriers.

How wrong I was! The misunderstandings (误解) began at the airport. I was looking for a public telephone to give my American friend Penny a call and tell her that I had arrived. A friendly old man saw me looking lost and asked if he could help me.

“Yes,” I said, “I want to give my friend a ring.”

“Well, that’s nice,” he said. “Are you getting married? But aren’t you a bit young?”

“Who is talking about marriage?” I replied. “I only want to give my friend a ring to tell her I’ve arrived. Can you tell me where there’s a phone box?”

“Oh!” he said, “There’s a phone downstairs.”

When at last we met, Penny explained the misunderstandings to me.

“Don’t worry,” she said to me. “I had so many difficulties at first. There are lots of words which the Americans use differently in meaning from British. You’ll soon get used to all the funny things they say. Most of the time British and American people understand each other!”