The Odd Multi-Lingual Encounter: A European Tradition?

Once upon a time in the not-so-distant past, I used to write poetry. Every now and then I'd write something that I actually liked. I read the stuff too, my own and other people's, carefully curated, at open mic nights. Somehow, all of this activity stopped when I moved back to Philadelphia in 2006 and hasn't really picked up again, despite ample time and plenty of provocation. Today, however, a simile occurred to me which, while not perhaps poem-worthy, seemed worth noting in more prosaic form.

So I'm at an academic conference at L'Université Libre de Bruxelles, which is conducted in French. This is fine. I can cope with introductory remarks and (to my surprise!) papers on topics I already know quite a lot about. There was a lady speaking a hybrid of Russian and Czech and I could even extract the gist from that. Admittedly, my linguistic skills weren't up for the lady who peppered her paper (in French, on a topic I didn't already know quite a lot about) with Polish and German, as well as some opera singing (really), but on the whole I was pleased with myself.

The trouble came with the coffee breaks, the little pauses between sessions, lunch, etc. I always hate these parts of conferences anyway. I'm too new to this scene to be presenting anything, which means no one knows who I am or what I do and so there's no easy way to lapse into conversation and whole thing makes me horrifically uncomfortable. I suspect this has been acerbated by living in London where people don't talk to each other, which has no doubt aggravated my tendency to paranoia and anti-social behavior (of the hiding in corners, not hitting people, kind). Anyway, during one such coffee break in which no one was speaking English, it occurred to me that speaking a foreign language in a social situation, with intelligent people, is a bit like jumping rope. Bear with me here. It's a classic playground scenario. As there were two languages on the table, let's say there's some serious Double Dutch going on. You're standing there watching the kids who are jumping and you think, "I understand what they're doing, I think I could do that" and you begin to think about jumping in. This in itself is tricky, but you've been practicing in a controlled environment and think you could just about handle it. But just as your feet are about to leave the ground, you realize that jumping in is only half the battle – once you're in, you have to keep up and who knows what those turners, who are really professional-looking, will throw at you. So you end up slinking off to the swings. Again.

I think the jumping-in panic is acerbated by being a native English speaker. Whatever arguments we make about the serendipitous fact that our mother tongue "just happens" to be the world's lingua franca, we are strongly cast in the role of the playground linguistic dunce. Complicating our position on the bottom run of the language ladder is the aplomb and confidence with which foreigners butcher English. All around us, in the cosmopolitan cities of the Anglophone world and beyond, we are accosted with tragic misspellings and mispronunciations. Of course we generate plenty ourselves; while an undergrad, I recall seeing an English department memo that read "Your invited!" An English major and member of the department Honor Society, I contemplated asking for a tuition refund. By in large, though, when we're confronted with these errors, we tend to laugh them off. We may ridicule the source of the error amongst ourselves, but rarely do we dish out the degree of vehement angst directed at me by a Czech sandwich shop employee when I had the audacity to express my wish for a butter-free sandwich with the offensive phrase "bez masla" instead of the correct "bez mas-LEM" (emphasis hers).

I'm in no way defending widespread Anglophone monolinguism – it's fantastic what worlds open up with even a cursory working knowledge of another language, and there are plenty of notable multi-lingual Anglophones I can think of, including many of my acquaintance. Still, I don't think that weak NNS (non-native speakers, a lovely EFL term) of English realize just how many breaks we give them. Lousy pronunciation, random syllable emphasis, disregard for number agreement, dodgy past participles – we frequently let them slide as long as we get the gist. In dealing with foreigners, your average Anglophone assumes a completely utilitarian approach to language. Has person X communicated what they meant to say? Yes? Cool. Admittedly this has its downside – EFL teaching is horrifically utilitarian and actually painful at times if the teacher happens to love the language, and I also think its fostered an image of English as a less beautiful and expressive language than it actually is. But that's for another day.

I contrast this generally laissez-faire Anglophone-to-NNS attitude with my experiences speaking my second and third languages, the aforementioned French and Czech. While I am frequently surrounded by supportive friends who speak these languages and humor me (it helps if they've had some wine), the following two reactions have been known to occur: 1) An immediate switch to English; 2 ) a blank stare. The second doesn't particularly bother me and is most likely my fault and easily rectifiable if I stop, calm down, and repeat. But the first really gets my goat. It's so completely unhelpful. Here I am , trying, genuinely endeavoring, to communicate with you, in your country, in your language. I know I'm equal to the task of ordering dinner, because I've done it before and have actually had real conversations in this language, so I can't be that incomprehensible. If I barged into your establishment and started ordering in English, that would be rude and you could be justifiably cross with me for my implied cultural imperialism and sense of entitlement. But I haven't done that. I've ordered a sandwich using the genitive and not the instrumental, or I've paused a milli-second longer than is tolerable when asked if I'm going to eat ici ou sortir. The auto-switch to English feels like a dismissal and creates an imbalance in Anglo/non-Anglophone world; when's the last time you heard a barista in London or New York immediately switch to Chinese or French or Russian to help a customer who was perfectly able to conduct the transaction in English? Admittedly English-speakers are likely more used than anyone in the world to adapting to accented versions of their language (just look how many exist among native speakers). But it seems to me that linguistic foreign relations would greatly improve if the other side could make a similar effort to acknowledge that foreign-accented speech, while not perfect, is not actually incomprehensible and might help stem the seemingly unstoppable flow of English into every nook and cranny of everyone's life, everywhere.

These phenomena seem to me to make the assumption of Anglophone monolingualism a self-fulfilling prophesy. Still, I shall soldier on in pursuit of my personal linguistic nirvana – a stress-free conference coffee break.

Konec/Fin/The End