Despite all the reasons you’ve very likely heard about the benefits of learning another language – good for your degree, good for your travels, good for your career – some people seem to think that being multilingual isn’t all that important anymore. We’re here to remind you that not only is it important, it may very well be necessary.

The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary. – Vidal Sassoon

It’s true that there are more and more people learning and speaking English these days. In fact, English is, according to some measures, the most widely spoken language in the world, the de facto lingua franca. Approximately 1.5 billion people around the world speak English, whether as their native tongue or as a foreign language, and this number is still growing.