母语为英语的烦恼
Non-Anglos won’t let us speak their languages

By Michael Skapinker, August 20, 2014

Anglophones will struggle to find people prepared to talk in a foreign language to them

----------------------------

This isn’t fair, I said in French to two fellow conference-goers during a coffee break. You are in the majority here. We should be speaking your language, not mine. They indulged me for a few sentences – and then switched back to English.

With school examination results out, the UK is having its annual panic over young people not studying foreign languages. There were 10,000 fewer taking language exams this year than there were at the end of the 1990s.

“Languages are an important part of business,” says John Cridland, head of the CBI, the employers’ group. “That second or third language gives your competitor from Germany, or France, or the Netherlands, the edge.”

That may be true. But those eager young anglophones who take his advice and learn another language face disappointment. Not only is mastering someone else’s language hard. When you do learn to speak it, you will struggle to find people prepared to speak it to you. While you have been learning their language, they have been learning yours. And English is what they want to speak.

My conference experience was not the only such one I have had – and it is not just top executives who have resisted my attempts to speak their language.

At a trade fair in the south of France this year, I went to the bar and asked in French for some mineral water. “Would you like ice?” said the bartender, in English.

This is quite a change. I remember, years ago, asking the person who answered the telephone at a large French company whether she spoke English. “No, you can speak French,” she told me in French. I cannot see that happening today.

Perhaps francophones don’t think I speak their language well enough. I work hard at it, reading the Paris press online and listening to a French podcast most days.

To what effect? I was in a meeting a couple of years back with six people in Geneva. After initial chit-chat in French, they switched to English, even though, I estimated, I spoke better French than at least three of them spoke English.

Is this just a French issue? Are French speakers so unused to hearing foreigners speak their language that they cannot bear to hear it mangled?

Possibly, but I have seen the same switch to English happen elsewhere. When I worked in Greece in the early 1980s, people were so delighted I was bothering to learn their language that they were happy to chat in it even when I could barely manage a sentence.

By the time I left four years later, they were effusively complimentary, ignoring my mistakes. They still are – “you remember your Greek after 30 years!” – but then they, too, switch to English. Once again, it is not just business people: taxi drivers and hotel staff do it too.

The tone is subtly different. Whereas I see French language-switching as passive-aggressive, the Greek switch is enthusiastic: why speak our language when we can speak yours?

Why is it happening? I have some theories. First, English is now a prerequisite for any job that requires contact with foreigners. Whether that job is in the boardroom, behind the reception desk or touting for customers outside a restaurant, you need to be able to speak English. Perhaps addressing people in their own language rather than English suggests they lack that crucial professional competence.

Second, as English has become the lingua franca of business, science and academia, people now see their own languages as part of their private domain, reserved for friends and family. In conversations with both French and Greek friends, I have found them happier to speak their own languages.

Third, it is possible that I give up too easily. Rather than meekly accepting that the conversation should revert to English, perhaps I should carry on speaking their language as insistently as they do mine until they surrender.

There are more civilised ways of behaving. I used to have lunch with the London-based correspondent of a French newspaper. We would spend half the meal speaking English and half French. This carried on even when his wife told him it was the most stilted and artificial arrangement she had ever heard of. Eventually he was posted elsewhere and I have not found a replacement.

If you wish to apply for this role, please do so to the address below, in whatever language you like.

michael.skapinker@ft.com