to be fair that happens bizarrely often, I've known plenty who basically know a handful of words and phrases from a travel book and say they can speak a language. The US is also pretty middle of the road as far as multiligual and near the top in terms of linguistic diversity, many of the Caribbean nations, East Asian countries, and some Latin American countries are near the bottom and a bunch of European countries are actually pretty monolingual with Portugal, Iceland, Malta, and the city states being pretty monolingual.