> It's interesting that the article starts with the line "True bilingualism is a relatively rare thing". That's probably the case in the US or English-speaking world, but definitely not the case in many other areas.
"True bilingualism is a relatively rare thing" is a truly bizarre statement for most of the world, I should think. FTR, I was raised "truly bilingual" -- I would go to kindergarten with kinds who spoke X, speak Y with my parents and immediate family, try to speak Y with the butcher until he told me he didn't understand X, then speak X, and be understood. (I think I was 5-7ish, so this is obviously from recollection by my parents.) I'm still fluent in X and Y, although one has suffered in pronunciation terms, but that's mostly through general atrophy from disuse, not because I can't do it, somehow.
I think the exception may be exactly those countries who have some-sort-of-English as their native language (UK/Canada/America/etc.) They can usually afford to not bother with the others.
... though I do think it's a massive shame in terms of general cultural deveolpment. Again, English-speakers don't have this, but the whole "grammtical gender" thing is a massive eye-opener[1], especially is you manage to learn several different languages that not only have different geners for specific things, but also have different numbers of genders. (E.g. Danish, outside of specific persons, has two genders. German and French have three genders -- which, tellingly, don't actually agree across various nouns.)
[1] Not to anything fundamental, just to how absurd language is as a construct.