monolingual

If you're monolingual, you speak just one language. If you are monolingual, your chances of landing a job as a translator are pretty darn slim.

Your whole family might be monolingual, while your best friend comes from a family that speaks Spanish at home and English at school — in other words, they're bilingual. Being monolingual can be limiting, since you can only communicate clearly with others who speak your language. Learning new languages and becoming bilingual (or even multilingual, speaking several languages) is also good for your brain. The Greek root mono means "one," and the Latin lingua means "tongue" or "language."