Language skills are essential tools for leadership according to Rawn Shah from Forbes in his article Leadership Skills Multiply With Language Skills. Focusing on how language learning helps to understand culture and worldview differences, essential for business success, Shah suggests that learning language is one of the tools that leaders often overlook. As peacebuilding in organization requires an understanding of culture, environment, structures and strong leadership, this article has something to say for peace practitioners as well.
Language for Peace Forum
Resources for language learning as peacebuilding
Leadership Skills and Language Skills
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Language for Peace Forum 
Portugal 1?? That can’t possibly be right… English is spoken very widely in Portugal, and many even speak a third or a forth language…!
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Posted by ladyofthecakes | July 27, 2015, 3:50 pmYou may be right. These numbers are based on average number of languages from the Eurobarometer 386 survey organized by the European Commission (see the link to the article and click below the map for more details) I’d be interested to know if you find other data on it. The languages we “speak” can always be a bit ambiguous since there’s no common definition and surveys can be interpreted in many different ways.
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Posted by clwoelk | July 27, 2015, 8:37 pmYes, I did look at the article… still, am puzzled 😉 In the case of Spain, 1.5 makes sense, despite the prevailing poor standard of English, because many Spaniards are indeed bilingual, owing to the regional languages of Euskara, Catalan and Galician. Putting Germany at 2.0, on the other hand, seems overly optimistic to me. A large number of Germans who are not university educated are effectively monolingual.
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Posted by ladyofthecakes | July 28, 2015, 12:41 amInteresting! What do you think might make for the difference in data?
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Posted by clwoelk | July 30, 2015, 6:58 amNo idea…! 😉
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Posted by ladyofthecakes | July 30, 2015, 9:10 am