There are few people to handle difficult cross-regional topics such as water resources or climate change, and few linguists fluent in tongues helpful beyond Asia.
In Luxembourg, an astonishing 99 per cent of people said they spoke a second language, while Lithuania, Latvia, Denmark and Sweden had more than 90 per cent of people fluent in another tongue.
Our language is spoken so widely that it makes us lazy about learning others but I would love to be fluent in another tongue.
He relies on a wide circle of collectors and musicians fluent in foreign tongues, and has conducted voluminous correspondence with academics around the world.
"I have every reason to believe," he writes, "that an individual man or woman fluent in several tongues seduces, possesses, remembers differently according to his or her use of the relevant language".
There is Grandma, fluent in the old tongue.
Mrs. Whitman once lived in England, and is fluent in the native tongue.
Sometimes, the goal is more to familiarize people with a foreign culture than to make them fluent in a foreign tongue.
Indeed, in some cases, the expense involved in subtitling persuades the producers of low-budget pictures to cut corners and hacks not entirely fluent in the secondary tongue can come up with some amusing howlers.
But, notes one observer wryly, it means that until they have had time to learn the new words, none of the existing Cornish speakers will be fluent in their new tongue.Nevertheless, say supporters, deciding on an official form of the language is worth some short-term pain.
