Yes, yes, we Americans should know more languages. Aside from our first-generation immigrants, few Americans are fluent in any language except English.

It can be vaguely embarrassing, when you get into a conversation with someone from, say, Europe (especially northern Europe, where seemingly everyone speaks English) and their second language is almost as good as your first.

But we can’t beat ourselves up too much for our monolingual tendencies, and here’s why:

English has become the globe’s lingua franca. (Which is a tiny joke; “lingua franca” translating to “French language,” an expression that originated back when French was the international language. Say, 200 years ago. Ha.)

Anyway, you can cover any Olympics knowing only English. That’s all you need.

The official Olympic languages are English and French, but hardly anyone bothers with French anymore, unless the room is full of French reporters.

Here, it’s English and Mandarin Chinese that matter. And the only reporters who speak Mandarin are limited almost exclusively to the home-country reporters. Nobody else speaks it.

And when any two foreigners converse, they’re going to do it in English 90 percent of the time, because that’s the one language both of them knows, at least a little. (It’s almost fun, to eavesdrop on an English-language conversation between non-native speakers. They’re trying to make points the other can’t quite figure out, and you know what they mean, and could explain it to the other guy, but you don’t want to butt in …)

We can credit English dominance to the British Empire … and also to 60 years of American global dominance. The language from one small island is now the basic form of international discourse everywhere.

We like to think English is logical and easy, but that’s because we grew up with it. Of course, it can be quite complicated. Its spelling is a mess, thanks to French influences from the Norman Invasion.

But it is easy, in some regards. Linguists seem to believe that subject-verb-object word order in sentence construction – which is the English norm – is a bit easier to learn. English also has dispensed with gender-specific articles. All inanimate objects are “it.” In many languages, that chair could be “her” or even “him,” and the only way to get it right is to memorize it.

Also, I’m trying to recall a stat from a huge linguistics book I have at home, and I want to say that something like 70 of the 100 most-used English words are one syllable. And about 28 of the next-most-common are two syllables.

That is, it’s not all that difficult to memorize 100 English words and be able to string together the basics. Pidgin English, that is.

(Oh, this reminds me of a random moment, on a bus last week. A Portuguese journalist was talking to a TV guy from Bahrain. In English, of course. Somehow, the subject of Arabic came up, and the Bahrain guy said, “Arabic is the easiest language in the world to learn.” And the Portuguese guy said, “For you? Or for me?” And his point was taken. Everyone thinks their own language is easy.)

Anyway, I’m not feeling particularly guilty for being monolingual, because English is all I need, at the Olympics, at the World Cup, when traveling in most parts of the world.

I took four years of German in school (three in high school, another in college) and I was pretty decent at it, way back when.

But there is little call for German – unless you’re in Germany. So my skills have rusted.

And all those bright and industrious foreigners we want to pat on the back for being conversant in English? Well, they have to be. Because Olympic info is not being disseminated in Swedish, Spanish, Italian, French, Tagalog, Russian, Swahili, Bantu, Vietnamese …

We live in an era where English matters most. We’re lucky, not bad.