"Another thing to keep in mind, when you get to feeling bad about being monolingual, is that the fair question is not 'how many languages do you know?' It is, 'of the languages spoken by five million people or more within a thousand miles or so of where you live, what percentage do you know?'"
By that metric you shouldn't feel bad for not speaking Russian in most of Russia, or for not knowing the most common languages in your immediate surroundings in large swaths of Africa (i.e. most Bantu languages would be excluded).
IRL interactions are just one aspect of life. Pretty important, sure, but it’s not the only important thing.
In the case of the US the languages that would meet that criteria in most parts of the country would be English and Spanish. But there are also hierarchies around languages, ie people that speak the more dominant languages are less likely to speak the less dominant languages, but the speakers of the less dominant languages are expected to speak the more dominant languages and suffer higher consequences if they don’t.
This is why it's so much easier to only speak English than it is to only speak another language.
It’s pretty easy to only speak German within the DACH countries. Huge online communities as well that speak German.
I’d wager it’s similar for several other large languages, e.g. Spanish or Chinese, OTOH they are even larger, OTOH they probably don’t have the same advanced dubbing industry that we have.
> one for Spain and one for LATAM
What’s the difference there for someone who is only bilingual (English and German)? :D
An example that comes to mind, as a first year Spanish student (I'm doing my best but fact check me because I'm very much still learning!) with a Latin wife, is "el carro," which means car, and is common in some Spanish speaking countries but others might use "el coche" -- I believe this dialectic difference even exists within Latin American Spanish speaking countries!
There are differences in pronunciation too but that obviously doesn't apply to subtitles
But yes, it is mostly a difference of vocabulary, accent and pronunciation, and also how or if to translate the names of characters and the movies themselves.