@wolfwood:
Which even when exposed to actual Spaniards will be borderline useless since they talk way too damn fast and slang laced. Me cago en la puta:getlost:
Isn't that basically every language though when you actually talk with a native speaker?
I have to slow down and talk like a newscaster when I'm in Cyprus, even with the inlaws who learned English in school, because otherwise the real deal is too raw and fast.
–- Update From New Post Merge ---
@Noqanky:
I agree with you, it's hard to argue for the United States being isolated when there's people in this country from all over the world
Having people from 100 different countries scattered among 5 times more people born and raised speaking American English isn't going to be pushing anything other than English.
Take a crowd with 3/4 monolingual English speakers, and the other 1/4 might be a Polish speaker, a Vietnamese speaker, a Greek speaker, and an Arabic speaker….but what factors are pushing their native languages into ...any use by anyone else? None. That same crowd in Sweden is going to produce the same results. That same crowd in Colombia, the same results.
They speak them at home and with friends from the same culture. And that's it.
The proximity to Latin America DOES produce a heavy concentration of Spanish, and well that does impact things and make many Anglophone Americans consider Spanish more seriously, but again the Latino immigrants are trying for English not the other way around. I highly doubt you'll find any examples of a much richer country bordering a poorer one (where this is the historical norm as well) where the richer one speaks lots of the latter ones language.
Like I REALLLLY doubt that Germans learn lots of Polish for instance. Or that Greeks learn lots of Albanian.
Basically you're confused. Geographic isolation means the actual factor that produces bilingualism beyond learning English, is being neighbors in areas with lots of languages (or having multiple native languages of note). Like a place like in the middle of Europe is going to have more exposure and practical usage of learning multiple stuffs.
Or of course former colonial languages are also a major factor in bilingualism in places like India or Nigeria. Even Western Europe experiences much more of this than the Anglophone countries.
These factors don't exist in the Anglophone world.