Language acquisition is not known to be quickly accomplishable or straightforward. Most of us spend four years in a high school classroom fruitlessly trying to learn French, Spanish, or German, to completely forget everything we've learned in the weeks after graduating. I even took three semesters of Russian language courses in college, which may or may not have been because my favorite comedian at the time was a fluent Russian-speaking drag queen. For monolingual divas like me, foreign languag…

Linguistic diversity is something that is not always praised in the workplace. Being bilingual is often seen as a boon for white-collar workers who know languages with reputations of being cosmopolitan or good to know for business. On the flip side, bilingual service workers tend to be perceived as being less intelligent when speaking in their native language.