Now on with today’s post.

I don’t think non-native speakers of English, eager to practice our era's lingua franca, will ever understand how it feels, when you’ve shown that you’re capable of having a conversation with someone in another language, and even may have been connecting with them nicely, proving yourself completely fluent, and then they throw in a few sentences of English at the end just to show that they could have had the conversation in English all along. That they make it clear – your efforts are sweet, but I was at base humouring you.

You might refer to this as an ‘accent tax’. The fact that, regardless of fluency, the presence of a foreign accent in a language other than English is liable to provoke an unsolicited switch into English, or at least a tension about this occuring; the idea that speaking a language with an accent is an automatic sign that the world language should be initiated.

These days it isn’t even an English accent which provokes this; any non-native accent is seen as a prompt to change, even if the other language itself is spoken fluently. It’s as if an order has come down on from on high to not speak anything other than English with foreigners, and there has been a switch to this attitude, a homogenisation, in living memory, particularly in customer service settings. And I know from my own experiences at various Brussels guichets that these days people plenty of people show up to shops and services and just expect English to be spoken, without even asking, know that the link between ‘living abroad’ and ‘learning the local language’ has been broken.

In the Anglosphere, switching to the interlocutor's native language doesn’t happen, no matter how bad the speaker’s accent in English, in part because there is no other language to switch to but also that to switch on someone clearly struggling in a foreign language is seen as rude. I speak four languages myself, and would never show up a German or a French person if I heard them struggling in English in the UK; ironically, they’re usually delighted to speak their native language in such situations as the opportunity arrives much more rarely.

But the further irony here is that foreigners speak English with all manner of accents and it is no impediment to their ‘mastery’ of the language. Senior people at professional organisations can do all their business in fast American English with the thickest accent and still put down on their CV ‘full professional proficiency’. They are not lying. You can come into the English-speaking world and be acclaimed for your acting, like Javier Bardem, and still do your roles in a thick Spanish brogue. You can be one of the great political philosophers in Hannah Arendt and still speak English with an intense German accent which you show no desire to improve. It’s even a little quirky! In English-speaking culture, un accent n’est pas la guerre.

Can you imagine the same in other cultures? That bad accents would be not so much tolerated as celebrated? Of course, there are people who come in from outside language communities and do extraordinary things, the Canadian comedian Dashan (big mountain) for example, whose Chinese got good enough to perform on Chinese TV and who became something of an ‘honorary Chinaman’ for an older generation. Jodie Foster often appears in French films in French – indeed, quite a few female Anglophone actors have gone that route.

Yet it always seems such a big deal, not being native, like the comedian Gayle Tufts who in Germany used to make shows out of her bad German; or the Dutch comedian Rudi Carell, who’d made his living performing in Germany and whose German was fluent with a Dutch accent, being asked by an interviewer, ‘Can you speak better German than you do?’

Of course, all these figures were embraced by other cultures, just in a different way than elsewhere, with a greater sense of their uniqueness. There were fewer of them, I suppose, and more of a fuss is made of the non-native, more strangeness attached to their accent. I remember when I used to perform stand-up comedy in German audiences used to tense up when I spoke German, with a sense of ‘Who is this guy and why does he know our culture?’ The way round that was to encase it in English; they didn’t mind German-speaking sections within English sets, but an Englishman purely doing German was too much for them. Or maybe I just wasn’t very funny in German.

Living abroad, I’ve always felt my accent is an elephant in the room. You’re waiting to say something, and then you do, and sometimes you see such disappointment in people’s eyes when you speak – even something akin to fear. Who is this person? Where do they come from? Why do they know my language? How am I to behave?

Being most used to hearing them, most English native speakers are very welcoming to non-native accents, and yet for other language communities it seems to present an enormous challenge to hear their language mispronounced. The switch to English in these contexts seems at some level a desire to preserve the purity of the tribe and perhaps even some kind of compensation for not speaking the world language by emphasising exclusivity. Our language is smaller, but it’s pure.

There are glorious exceptions; Italian and Spanish speakers are extremely welcoming, as they are welcoming to outsiders in most contexts. Have food! Have shelter! Have language! And I suspect members of minority language communities would be delighted, if surprised, to hear, say, English-accented Basque.

Yet at base, having an accent means ‘getting the sounds wrong in a way that shows you don’t come from round here.’ At base it means ‘I speak your language worse.’ For most people, it still seems to present an obstacle to taking someone quite so seriously as they would as a native speaker. It’s worth saying to that it’s virtually impossible to eradicate a foreign accent from a second language learnt as an adult, and nor should that really be anyone’s goal; keeping it sounding relatively pleasant is a more realistic ambition. Yet it still seems very strange that it could be seen as ‘cute’ or ‘sexy’ or even ‘endearing’ to effectively wear a big propellor hat on your head which says ‘foreigner’ and vigorously twirl it round by the power of your own vocal chords.

The irony of it is that when my accent does bring a switch to English the English itself is often dire, with the thickest non-native accent imaginable. It wouldn’t annoy me so much, this cacophonous mangling of my native tongue, if there wasn’t this concordant strictness about the use of, say, French. As a group of speakers the French react to the slightest mispronunciation of English as if the Panthéon were being defiled. As I’ve written elsewhere recently, you can have the world language or you can have a perfectly pronounced language, but not both. A world language looks like English does these days – people filtering the language through their native tongues and sound clusters and something semi-coherent emerging. A tool, but not a refined one.

However, I will absolutely not accept is that the French accent is sexy in English. Why is it sexy to not make the slightest attempt to pronounce the words right? Why is it sexy to not make the merest gesture in the direction of English phonology? To treat correct English pronunciation like the shit on your shoe? All those pinched French vowels, the absence of plural ‘s’, the complete absence of ‘h’ sounds…. Bah. Laziness isn’t sexy. Calques aren't sexy. Couple that with an attitude that treats the slightest infraction of la langue de Molière as an international scandal, and you have what I would argue is a robust linguistic anaphrodisiac. Now, I do indeed agree that the French are very sexy, just in French.

In reality, as a punter, I have to say that I find vanishingly few foreign accents in English sexy. Germans are endearing for five minutes but the unchanging rhythm and endless Americanisms soon become annoying; the Norwegians sound weirder the more you listen, and while I have a soft spot for how the Dutch sound in English, small doses are fine. Indeed, having spent a large part of my life listening to non-native English, there are only two accents I would say really reliably profile as sexy; the Greeks, who come across as really beautifully whispery and calm, and for some reason the Czechs, who just sound oddly amiable.

I can only regrettably extrapolate from this that I am unlikely to be sexy in any of my second languages. That I myself sound weird and off-putting when I get all the sounds slightly wrong, just as foreigners do to me. This was always my dilemma in Germany – I didn’t know which language to speak with German dates.

Frankly, after years living in their country, my German was almost inevitably better than their English, but at the same time, they wanted their charming Englishman to be in English. To live the Colin Firth fantasy for an evening. In my experience, there’s also an unspoken convention that in relationships it’s the woman who does the linguistic heavy lifting, tho most of the male speakers of smaller Northern European languages that I know prefer to speak English with their foreign partners.

Whatever, while I think we can get good at foreign languages, and that learning them is massively enriching, aiming to be hot in in an auxilliary tongue is a fool's errand. Certainly for a guy, the basis of sexiness is charm, which requires improvisation, and it is damnably difficult to improvise in a second tongue. Even my body language, an important part of coming over as attractive, grows notably goofier and less controlled when communicating in a second tongue.

There’s a lot of soppy nonsense about how mispronouncing words is a sign that people learnt said terms by reading them, or than an accent is a sign of bravery, but the fact is we do look down on people with accents. I do and you do too. Even if on some level charming, an accent shows someone is an outsider; perhaps one sees them spoken to a little slower, taken as a little bit more stupid, or, as we began with, refusing to speak the local language with them at all. An accent is presumed to indicate that you don’t understand the language, or the culture; it means things get dumbed down for you and ignorance is presumed. Plus there is often tho not always that aforementioned look of fear from people when they hear your accent and struggle to know how to behave and where to allocate you.

Luckily, we’ve now created an international language where you can pronounce it however you want, whenever you want, all the while imagining you sound like Tom Cruise or Olivia Rodrigo. Perhaps that is sexy, in the sense of ‘an easy lay’, a language which is anybody's. For if there’s one thing an international language can’t afford to have, it's standards.

My adult life has been spent acquiring foreign languages. And this at a time when that is arguably both easier and less important than ever for a native English speaker. It has involved an enormous amount of bloody-mindedness and occasional outright dust-ups to get to the competencies I have. But it’s also clear that the reaction has been very different, and often internally varied, depending on the language I tried to learn, and it’s this that I want to offer you a tour through today.

Realistically, French is the most useful foreign language I’ve learnt. It’s a global language, the French are happy to assert it in international environments, and it even got me round a very distant country when I visited Senegal. It was the first language I started, due to my Francophile Mum; I can still just about remember the old Europe, the old Belgium, when people reached for it with foreigners as the first foreign language of choice and how self-conscious I felt not to know it. It’s also the language I do my everyday life in in Brussels, and there’s a sort of bouncy energy to doing basic admin in French which I can only enjoy.

What is true, and has always been true, about trying to speak French, is that the French correct you. Don’t take it personally. The French also correct each other. It feels like French natives, whether interacting with each other or foreigners, are always working towards a standard of ‘good French’ which you may or may not be meeting at any given moment.

What’s annoying about our new world where the French speak or at least do something with English is that they show none of the same care; they’ll be correcting a foreigner on saying accu-eil instead of acc-ueil but at the same time talking about President Doo-nal Tram. Indeed, one of the most unappealing habits of French learners is to adopt exactly this snobbery about other learners of French, become plus royaliste que le roi as it were.

This is the unique combination French offers you – a language which is genuinely useful, formidable in its precision and cultural reach, but also an experience which can be very tough on a learner due to its speakers exacting standards for use. It’s rare to combine an international language with expectations of it being used perfectly, but somehow the French have got there; I wonder sometimes, and this is ironic for a langue Républicaine, if to truly love the French language you don’t have to somewhere in you have something of the snob.

I remember one of my French teachers ending a course we had done together by going round the group offering feedback; his for me was ‘James speaks good French with an English accent. He speaks German too, perhaps with an English accent too.’ What a perfect essay in disdain. When I have got good feedback on my French, it’s invariably been from other foreigners; many of them have emerged as great fans of the language and not such great fans of all those who speak it.

I’ve always viewed the languages I’ve learnt as to some extent the members of my family. In this analogy, your native language is like the friendly uncle you see now and then who requires relatively little maintenance, and my aforementioned French would be the difficult but beloved teenage child. German, though, would almost certainly be my wife; loyal, an enduring love, someone I met young and stayed with through various ups and down. The first cut which cut deepest.

My German is better than my other languages, simply because I lived there when young and committed to it, which involved a certain amount of German whispering in face of Germans keen to practice their (often proficient and generally charmless) English. Germany is a big country, at least population wise, and I’ve met Germans with all kinds of attitudes to their language; ones who asked why on earth they should speak German with Americans and Brits and others who were proud of the language and subtly delighted when others tried to learn it. Some Germans are more into German than others. While on one hand I experienced a German comedian tell me in English ‘In my country, it’s my choice what language I speak’ – up there with the most contemptuous things anyone has ever said to me – I’ve also had people tell me that I spoke the best (specifically ‘cleanest’) German they’ve heard from a foreigner. It just suits me, German, it’s very intellectual but also capable of visceral directness, qualities I enjoy tapping into.

A question I’ve often asked myself is if it is really possible to have friendships with people across languages. Like if there isn’t some essential part of themselves people hold back in reserve in their native tongue, if my foreign-language friends aren’t always getting a kind of diluted version of me or I them.

Still, to the extent that I’ve managed cross-linguistic friendships, it’s definitely been in German, in long complex chats about Gott und die Welt (you can work out what that means) with German friends, where we’ve really got into it. Georg Kammerer, Johannes Blank, Maite von Waldenfels; fabulous people I had lovely German-speaking friendships with. Incidentally, many of these chats have occurred in South Germany, where I’ve found people more open to talking German or indeed any other language with foreigners. Baden-Wurttemberg, Bayern and Austria are are all etched upon my heart.

Professionally, the language has been of great use but perhaps still not as much use as it should have been. For the most spoken language in Europe, German maintains a relatively modest presence on the international stage and Germans can be very shy to speak it even when they have the option to. I understand the reasons for that, the historical German fear of asserting the slightest twinge nationalism, but it does sometimes seem a logic to me that ‘Because of WWII, I as a German have to speak bad American.’

Yet anybody who knows German culture knows the Germans have always been in thrall to some other culture and its perceived sophistication; earlier it was French, for the German Romantics Italy, now it is the Anglophone world. And that’s the great singularity in my view of Germany; it’s the biggest country I know which is also outward-looking, as the amount from other languages translated into German testifies to. The German-speaking world is intellectually wide, in line with Goethe’s old concept of the Germans needing to cultivate Innerlichkeit, interiority.

The language will always be my first love, and I’m glad that I insisted on learning it. I did often have to ask, though, which directness was at least excellent training in German communication norms.

This one has just been fun. To continue the family analogy, a bratty, boisterous child, young, full of energy and surprises, and growing up fast.

Learning Dutch it has finally decoupled the idea for me that the languages you choose to learn, beyond English, have anything really to do with their usefulness. I’ve picked up Dutch, having German and English already of course, to a pretty advanced level within a couple of years and so far it’s been both enormously enriching and professionally useless. Indeed, I wrote an ode to how positive an experience it’s been here; it’s made me feel closer to my family, of which there is a whole Antwerp, Dutch-speaking side, too.

I do, though, also live in Belgium, where the politics of speaking Dutch have long been contested and where learning Dutch has a special level of support and subsidy behind it. Here in Brussels, there is a happy coincidence of me (who wants to acquire as many foreign languages as I can) and a population desperate to assert the status of their own language in their own country. There are Dutch language centres, Dutch language days and Dutch language book groups in Brussels, in part to give Dutch natives the chance to use their own language in Belgian’s largely Francophone capital but also open for foreigners along for the ride.

I might well have had a less positive experience in Holland, albeit I had a pleasant time speaking Dutch on a recent trip to Rotterdam; so far, I’ve had nothing but encouragement to use and improve my Dutch.

I’ll give you a small example of how this positivity plays out in Brussels. I went into town to do some business recently, and in true Belgian style picked up a portion of chips. At the chippy, I ordered in French without problems and with an accent, and then the Francophone server switched to English with ‘Do you want a ticket?’ (This meaning receipt in English, Brussels variety). I felt belittled.

Then I went to the Dutch-speaking bookshop and paid for my items, with the lady at the till seeing my customer loyalty card which says on it James Harris, hardly the most Flemish of names. Yet she stayed in Dutch throughout the interaction, stayed polite and friendly and encouraging. Although my Dutch is still worse than my French, I have more positive interactions in the smaller language which creates a virtuous feedback loop.

Like all my other languages I’ve also had more sobering experiences. A woman I was working with recently who I asked to speak Dutch with me who just wouldn’t and replied to my every Dutch sentence in English for an hour. Dutch speakers who explain their language to me in English as if I didn’t know the first thing about it. A lady at a Dutch-language meetup who took exception to the German influence on my Dutch, hard corrected every single sentence I spoke, and almost left me in tears by the end of the evening. In part, I think she behaved like that because she came from a language where there isn’t such a big culture of foreigners learning it and she relished the chance to be hard on one for a change. Still, at least she was there trying to help outsiders learn, just with far too much strictness.

Yet above all the third-biggest Germanic language has been a positive and quick learn and has left me with the central realisation that what’s really decisive in acquiring a language is the experience you have doing so; indeed, you could even say that speakers of smaller languages are more likely, these days, to encourage foreigners in learning them, aware as many of them are of the need to maintain their language in a world of bigger and more dominant tongues. That's the optimistic view, anyway.

I’ve had serious goes at two others. CHINESE was the language of my ex-wife and both her and her family were seriously encouraging of my efforts; unfortunately, the end of the marriage brought the end of any interest on her part in encouraging me further. Fair enough and I accept that I’ve missed my chance to learn one of the few truly essential languages in the world today. I dearly miss having this fantastic language in my life.

RUSSIAN is the other, a language and literature I’ve long been obsessed with, and where Russians were endlessly encouraging, adoptive even, of people having a go at their complex but splendid tongue. And Russian is definitely the other language, hanging out with Georgians or Armenians, which has sometimes served as a lingua franca beyond English for me. It remains a big ambition of mine to go back and finish the job, tho the language’s image has suffered even in my eyes, those of a lifelong incorrigible Russophile. (It’s the snow, the vodka and the women). I’ve also managed to acquire basic conversational SPANISH and ITALIAN just by going to countries where they're spoken, and I’ve found in particular Italians exceptionally encouraging in face of any attempt at their almost extravagantly beautiful language.

Finally, based on two recent trips to the country, ROMANIANS are winningly delighted with your production of the merest word. I even had someone apologise for not speaking Romanian to me, a first for me as a learner.

It’s impossible for me to tell you that all this language learning has been good or not because, as I hope the piece above shows, it has been all manner of things; moments of huge joy and excitement and also humiliation and a feeling of being cut down to size. A lot of people thinking I’m stupid even as my own compatriots found me very clever. Languages have given me a living, but not a particularly lucrative one, and one threatened by the dominance of my native tongue which I am in some sense always trying to escape.

It’s certainly taken an awful lot of oglio di gomito to get, in adult life, to the shonky but fluent repertoire I currently draw upon. Four wonderful languages, four opened-up worlds. In all of them I’ve faced embarassement after embarrassment about my mistakes which I’ve felt no shame about whatsoever - the only shameful person to be is the person who has lived in a country for years and doesn’t know the local language.

Utility, then, is not the core of this; I’m not sure that for English speakers there is much use in foreign languages these days beyond Spanish, Chinese and perhaps French. Given that learning a language is primarily a personal asset, enriching above all in terms of public development, the thing to do is learn the language that you want to, be it big or small.

In beginning to do so, and this applies to pretty much all European languages by now, if you in the early stages want to avoid that sobering switch to English, you’re probably going to have to tell them not to do it as you’re learning their language. Because people want to practice their English. I understand that and would feel the same if English wasn’t my own native tongue. Still, the simple fact is that if I’d have helped out every single person who wanted to speak English with me, I’d never have learnt much German, French or Dutch at all.

By now I’m done with the gate-keeping attitude of a lot of Europeans to their native languages, the idea that they can mangle English to their hearts’ content but the slightest error in their own language registers it beyond incomprehensible and initiates an instant switch to English. Tired of the double standards. Personally, I think we should always be generous to people reaching out to learn another language and get out of their comfort zone, particularly if that person is living abroad with all the attendant risks of that. I'd never insist on using German with a German in the UK, for example, although ironically the Germans I've met there are happy to have a break from English.

The hope has to be is that in a world where soon enough most people will know English to a greater or lesser extent people will be, aware that they command the auxiliary language, more willing to speak their native tongue. That’s one possible future, but in the meantime, there are still enough non-English speakers out there to get truly fluent in pretty much anything; you just need to move to the provinces and change your name to something less Anglo-Saxon than ‘James Harris’. As for my next step, I’m considering learning Welsh. For as I’ve learnt, whether a language has 400 million speakers or 400,000, you can only talk to one person at a time.

In the debates around every aspect of literature and literary culture, in the Anglophone world at least – meaning those as to whether people are reading enough, the future of the humanities or the switch to audiovisual modes of media consumption – it seems ironic that the actually most important theme of today’s world literature, the unprecedented dominance of the English language, barely merits mention. Any more than goldfish remark upon the water they swim in.

My definition of a writer is someone with an unusually involved relationship to language. In this context, it seems to me that any content I can write in the language I am using today, the only language I can use to this degree, is less salient than that the choice of language itself. My native language has become ubiquitous and requisite to a degree that is actively harmful to other languages, not least because an increasing amount of the world’s business is done in a version of it at best deracinated and at worst catastrophically limited.

More perhaps than any other language in history, English has won, and to the extent that English-speaking culture takes any notice of it – with the honourable exception of those defending minority languages in places where English is the main language – it is with a sort of genteel chauvinism as to why English is the best language and deservedly on top.

Well, to be more accurate something called English is; anyone who has spent any time in international environments such as Brussels or Geneva knows that the language being used as a communicative auxillary there has very little to do with any local variety of English. I sometimes dub the English I hear in Brussels ‘The French revenge’, an en-masse calquing of Frenchisms into the English language via with the logic that, if French is no longer going to be the international language, the one we do use should at least be as Frenchified as possible.

A long time ago, I read one of those funny little ‘Bluffer’s Guides’, this one to the English, and it contained the claim that the ubiquity of English worldwide would make the English feel cosy. For my part, I’m not sure that’s the feeling the detached, error-riddled English I encounter in Brussels provoked, often spoken in an American accent and rammed full of register-inappropriate slang; it certainly doesn’t make me feel much at home.

It is a very weird experience to interact with this language as a native speaker of the language it has been named after; you are both advantaged and also forced to simplify yourself. It’s no more comfortable when people who know I'm Anglophone abroad make a demonstrative show of wishing me ‘Good morning’, as I don’t feel ‘Good morning’ belongs to me any more, that those words have no trace of locality. I feel no identification with international English at all. If these non-native speakers did want to make me feel at home they might want to greet me with my native Nottingham’s ‘Hey up me duck’, which has happened more often than you think. The ubiquity of my language has made me retreat to the local.

When I was young, I was quite angry that Anglophone culture was so parochial and uninterested in other languages. That it was entirely acceptable for my young English compatriots just to say ‘Oh, I’m crap at languages’ and be done with it for life, which always left me thinking ‘Well, we can’t all be.’

I made decisions to make sure that it wouldn’t be my destiny and went hard learning German and then French in my 20s and various other languages beyond. That did involve a lot of insisting people who wanted to practice English speak their native tongue with me and on a few occasions even some pretty ugly fights about that1. For all the struggles, it’s all been massively enriching and has led me to my career as an interpreter, although even that career is eroding at the edges due to the increasing dominance of English or at least what gets called it these days.

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In the meantime, here’s a little amuse-bouche from my friend about the challenges of learning languages with dyslexia, and why it’s well worth doing anyway.

Every day, I listen to a short audio recording of conversational French or Finnish on my Speakly language learning app. I read the text for ages, with the translation underneath. Occasionally, I hear a voice in my head go ‘Use the force Luke, let go.’ I turn off the text and translations. I close my eyes and listen intently… and can barely follow a word. I wonder ‘Why am I doing this to myself?’ Sisyphus pushed a boulder up a hill, all day, every day, for all eternity.

For my part, I push that boulder for an hour a week, at London’s Finnish Institute, but the outcome feels likely to be similar, tho perhaps with less glory involved than was the case for Sisyphus.

When he was a teenager, my older brother’s best mate would knock on our front door each morning to collect him, and they’d walk to school together. My brother was always running late. As such nearly every morning, Daniel would say ‘Hello’ and patiently wait around at the bottom of our stairs. One morning, Daniel stopped me and, his face bearing a huge grin said, ‘Check this.’ He then took our four juggling balls and began to smoothly juggle them round and round, face contorted with a mix of intense concentration and wonder.

Eleven-year-old me yawned and shrugged. To my surprise, Daniel exploded. Jabbing at me, he explained that he had dyspraxia, which meant that his being able to juggle was remarkable. Juggling for someone like him was near impossible, but through grit and perseverance, he’d learnt to do something he was told he’d never be able to. And I had just shrugged it off, mildly annoyed that he’d momentarily delayed me on my way to grab some Cinnamon Grahams.

After university, I went and studied for an NCTJ Diploma in Newspaper Journalism. During my course, I completed placements at a couple of local newspapers, only to witness an industry dying before my eyes. After that taste of clickbait, decay, and terrible wages, I chose not to go into journalism. Nevertheless, I breezed through most of my diploma, getting a First in all my assignments. Apart from finding Adobe InDesign an absolute headache, I don’t remember stressing about a single bit of coursework.

However, I didn’t get a distinction.IIn fact I nearly didn’t pass my diploma at all. You see, it was 2014, and the NCTJ Diploma was old school, and to pass it, you needed to learn shorthand to a speed of at least 60 words-per-minute, this being about half our average speaking speed. You needed to clear 80 words-per-minute to get the highest degree.

We were given three attempts to pass the 60wpm exams. To do so, you needed to transcribe a speech with fewer than five errors, no matter how minimal they were. I was in the final exam with a handful of other stragglers. Deep down, I think I got more than five errors in my final exam, but it was marked internally, and I believe my instructor took pity on me.

It wasn’t like I hadn’t practiced. I sat at my parents’ table for hours and hours working on my shorthand — often listening to a tape out loud, which must’ve been maddening for them. One evening, my brother came over and asked what I was up to. He commented that learning shorthand was pointless (correct), and anyway, my tape was so slow, couldn’t I just copy it out longhand? I scoffed. There is no way anyone could keep up with this tape and log it down verbatim, writing longhand. My brother bet me that he could. I smugly sat back in my chair and handed him my pen, ‘Go on, then.’

And he did it. Well, nearly, he missed a sentence or so, which would have pushed him over the five errors, but still! I was absolutely gobsmacked. I asked him how he did it, and he explained that once he fell behind the tape, he could process what was being said and just catch up. It meant that once the tape finished, he was still writing, but he still completed the transcript. He had remembered what had been, was writing out what had been said, all the while listening to what was currently being said, all at the same time. Black magic.

As a child, my brother would infuriate teachers. He would be chatting to his friends or staring out the window, and the teacher would snap at him and in that classic teacher way, ask him, in front of everyone, ‘Aaron, what have I just been saying?’

My brother would then repeat, word-for-word, what the teacher had just said moments earlier. Teachers found this both highly obnoxious and tricky to respond to. On the other hand, I infuriated teachers because, even when I was trying to listen to them, the sound went into one ear and out the other. I was diagnosed with dyslexia two years ago, and it means incidents like this have started to make sense.

During the pandemic, I also started learning languages in my spare time. I began learning Finnish, because I have some familial roots there, I am a Finnophile, and because I wanted to test myself. 

I also began learning French, because I remained burned and disappointed by the fact that I was not good enough to take it as a subject at A Level — and because I felt I needed to learn a  worthwhile language, alongside an essentially pointless one.

For French, I have dipped in and out of, doing weekly private tutoring, alongside the odd beginner term at the Institut Français or Alliance Française. I took two years away from learning it while I undertook my MA. Finnish I have plugged away at throughout — doing an hour a week of study, for several years now. I am probably at an A2 level in both languages. In French, I know more vocabulary, but I might be marginally better at sticking Finnish together to form coherent sentences. French function words still kill me.

Throughout all my classes, I have consistently had the worst listening skills of all the students in every group. Very simple sentences can fry my brain, and after I get lost on one sound or word, everything after it falls away. Often, when my teacher is speaking, it just sounds like noise. A jumbled-up series of sounds. Even tho she is uttering vocabulary that I already know.

My parents tell me that they were frequently called into my nursery due to my bad behaviour. When the teacher would tell me to stop, I just stared blankly at them and kept doing what I was doing. I probably just couldn’t understand them. I would sometimes try to explain why I was throwing sand out of the pit and it would just come out as noises and grunts. Learning languages has helped me understand why my speech was delayed as a child and why I struggled in my early years at school.

My childhood speech impediment lingers in my frequent tendency to get tongue-tied, and I think my dyslexia is the cause of the distinctive cadence of my speaking voice. However, I’ve mastered English pretty well now.

Yet perhaps I still felt I had something to prove. Like Daniel, I picked up a hobby that is uniquely challenging to me. Learning to juggle, like learning Finnish, is challenging and pointless, unless you’re in Finland, which I am currently not. But for Daniel, it was a sign that he could overcome the hand that he was dealt, through grit and perseverance. By learning foreign languages, I hope to do the same.

According to the US State Department, it takes an English speaker an average of 1012 class hours to learn Finnish to a professional standard. Studying it for one hour a week would mean it would take me about 20 years to reach a strong B2 level. I’d never get to the Finnish. Realistically, you’re never going to reach such a high level of conversational fluency without immersion, without constant practice in speaking and listening. As such, I know my language learning, in which I’m investing so much time, is a folly.

To an outsider, my learning decisions might just look like an eccentric quirk. Yet the next time you wonder why someone might be learning to juggle, or indeed picking up any other challenging hobby, consider the fact that what they are learning might have a significance for them that might not immediately be apparent.

Check out Layo’s Substack below.

Layo’s Substack

My personal Substack

By Layo Gibbons

This is the last free post of 2024; there'll be a stocking filler for paying subscribers on Sunday December 29th. Thank you so much for supporting this newsletter in 2024. Nous sommes, to fit with today's theme, sur la bonne voie.

One of the things which has most surprised me about living in Brussels, the multilingual capital of the EU, is how many people seem to consider multilingualism an expensive crock of shit. In my entire adult life, I’ve been in search of an environment where I can shelter from the overweening dominance of my native English, and suffice to say I haven’t found that in Brussels (tho I have spoken a surprising amount of Dutch).

I’ve been informed by multiple people that it would be more effective to do everything in English, usually people who stem from countries with high levels of English proficiency. Of course what is meant here by English is the Bubblish of Brussels, named after the city's European bubble, filled with things ‘preoccupying’ and ‘limiting’ speakers. Translated French, really, now with an extra seasoning of Americanisms, and the great fear around this language is that the people speaking it might even think that sound clever.

So I was intrigued to see ’s recent argument that the Europe’s pride in multilingualism is misplaced and that everything should be done in English. Now Sam is a good writer, it’s a good piece, and he’s a subscriber to this newsletter so clearly nothing less than a fine upstanding gentleman. Still, his piece is a rare example of something I disagree with entirely, with literally every word.

The Leopard

The case for monolingualism

“The language of Europe is translation…

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2 years ago · 12 likes · Sam Wilkin

Before I set out my arguments I should admit my bias; I am an interpreter, and I want my current profession to survive. Wilkin specifically laments the need for interpreters in his piece, making a pretty basic error that interpreters slow proceedings down. This is not the case. At our best, we very much speed things up, allowing quicker communication and that which there is to occur at a richer level.

I can say from quite a bit of experience that multilingual meetings with good interpretation provided flow more quickly and feel more substantial in nature than ones where non-natives universally employ the current global lingua franca; there is just a certain lack of energy to people communicating in second languages after a while, and in English-only meetings there is almost an inevitable dropping of attention after a while.

In my work life, I’m often asked whether I’m worried about the rise of artificial intelligence replacing interpreters, to which I reply with, whatever the outcomes there, I’m much more concerned about the trend to do more and more things in more and more settings in English. Increasingly younger interpreters from Spain, Germany or France often offer excellent retours into English – my own USP as an interpreter, my command of English as a native tongue, is as such increasingly both a scarcity and a luxury. A scarcity, because why do English natives need to learn foreign languages, and a luxury, because why not in the event other languages are spoken just have the English supplied by proficient non-native interpreters?

Indeed, for non-natives the latter's English is likely more comprehensible than mine. In many international contexts being a non-native speaker is now actually disadvantageous; I can, interpreting for non-native delegates, throw in an idiom like ‘There’s more than one way to skin a dead cat’ but, unless there are actual other native speakers there, or unless they are really conossieurs of the language, the phrase is likely to be more confusing than appreciated.

In this sense, there are now generally only two active languages in an international context; native English, an actual rich, complex, constantly expanding language, and the vast communicative framework of English as a framework of communication. It is only likely to cause confusion to speak the former in a context for the latter.

Even outlining that tho, is that really a state of affairs Sam finds optimal? His article seems in fact to be ascribing a much higher quality to current international English than its current state, as an absolute dog’s body of grammatical errors, mispronunciations and imported banalities deserves. Put simply, Globish in its European varieties is a language only a mother (or an EU commissioner) could love, and to my mind only maternal pride could explain arguing for it to attain yet more status.

It would of course be possible for large international institutions such as the UN or EU to operate exclusively in this English. It would save money, except on proofreaders. Yet dare I suggest that in our populist moment it is not a good idea for the accessibility of these institutions to further anchor in the deracinated English of educational elites. There are of course many who would go along with this, but there are just as many likely to rebel.

English only would only be more firmly anchoring them in the status of their Brahmin class – and nor do I believe that even more securely anchoring European institutions in globalized academese is likely to improve the quality of their legislation, with due respect to the quality of existing translation services within them.

Frankly, Wilkins’ argument that the EU doing everything English would be more democratic is bordering on the absurd; the only truly democratic position for the EU in terms of language would be one where every citizen had the right to use the language they wanted at its institutions. I'd also remind Wilkin that, tho they may not be prominent in his circle, there are still quite a lot of people in Europe who can’t speak English at all, not to mention the sub-category of those who do but do not find it their preferred mode of expression.

After all, English is the official language of just 2% of the EU 27’s current population, making it a quixotic choice as the sole working language for the continent; Wilkin, observing observing hotel staff in Stuttgart speaking with each other, observes that people are already making this choice; I would be deeply surprised, tho, if all said hotel staff believed in said English as a vehicle for their most profound level of communication, and that all of them were not also proud of their mother tongue and eager to integrate foreigners into it. And if the EU, the most transnational institution of their continent, does not work to promote and protect that process, who will?

Yet let’s give Wilkin's his due and imagine a future where the situation around Globish has improved and Europe’s citizens speak English much better, or at least the European political class do, than before. After all, 70% of Europe’s 15-24 year-olds now speak English to at least conversational level. Given this incoming tide, is the long term future inevitably doing everything in the impressive English of the globalized wonk?

I don’t think so; indeed, I can imagine in that situation, with good English as a given, that people would only be more willing to use and represent their native languages in international settings; it would no longer be necessary to show off your English, because everyone else would speak it too. Indeed, many of the people I know who speak the best non-native English – many of them have done wonderful things in the language – are more inclined to see the premium and advantage of their native language, and encourage others in their efforts to learn it.

For to speak a non-native language is always to lose a little control. It’s worth saying that even working flat out at the capacities of a native language, as I do here at SUQ – pauses to mop the sweat off my brow with a silk handkerchief – it’s still bloody difficult to get the words halfway right. To get the nuance on the nuance.

Now working in a second language does have its charms; I’ve a fair amount of experience of this having written and performed comedy in German, and you can make great connections in adopting a second tongue. There’s always a slight sense you’re being led by the language rather than using it to your own purposes. We see this in the European Union’s adoption of American-style political terminology; The European Green Deal, State of the Union, Fit for 55; it positions Europe’s USP as ‘We speak English like the Anglosphere, but worse.’ At times the EU seems to be carrying out its business like a poorly dubbed episode of the West Wing.

Still, I should make my argument more squarely on the basis of what I believe, which is that, at base, a Europe of English-only will be boring. I love the texture, the variety, the details of different languages and the different ways they present things. Even a change as minor from English ‘snow’ to Dutch ‘sneeuw’, all those vowels, is enthralling to me. The experience of even two such closely-related words strikes me as intrinsically different; now imagine the diatance again from ‘sneeuw’ to Italian's ‘nevicare’.

Language is a powerful manifestation of aesthetics to everyday experience, and if we opt for one language only, we are choosing to exist in only one linguistic flavour, one combination of rhythm, syntax and sound.

Perhaps a world of English only would save a few bob, but my what a dull one it would be; everyone at every event saying the same American buzzwords, the same deracinated phrases, making the same bloodless small talk. Wilkin is also flatly wrong about Europeans having no common culture – one the hallmarks of the Netflix age has been that foreign-language series such as ‘La Casa del Papel’, ‘Dark’ and ‘Call My Agent’ have broken out beyond their national borders in a way perhaps unimaginable previously, and part of that hallmark of that European culture, that thing which the US does not offer, is multilingualism.

An English-only European Union makes sense only if you don’t think culture, tradition, history, connection and empathy, as well as a responsibility to protect national heritage, play any role in its responsibilities. It is a rigidly utilitarian view of the world – and, if I may indulge stereotypes, in itself a slightly Anglo-Saxon perception of what language is there for. No wonder international monolingualism is such a popular idea amongst the Nordics and the Dutch, such pragmatic political cultures; in the Anglofied universe, all that matters is getting the wares sold. It also completely ignores the idea that English and its use might not be culturally neutral but might itself inherently involved the promotion of some particular ideas and cultures by its very use.

Tho it is useful and indeed essential to have a common language at the start of the 21^st century, my dream remains that conversations will always move on before the initial facilitation of the rootless tool; that couples who met in English will become trilingual, that children will grow up with different languages, that people will speak the languages which best suit them as some people will always be better at or fonder of English than others.

Imagine instead a Europe where every citizen has access to multiple languages, where people dip in and out of different tongues, where even minority languages take their turn in the sun. Maybe it sounds luxurious to Stefan, a little continentally decadent even, but surely part of the arc of human history is to have more and more people living lives where higher and higher levels of Massow’s hierarchy of needs are met.

Language is a human creation. This means we can as humans think of and design the future for it we want, and in my view a world of many languages just sounds more fun than one of only one language in town. And to think even longer term, I suspect we’ll one day encounter an alien species somewhere and work out pretty quickly that even international English has limits to its reach.

In discussions of learning another language, you will often see a question come up: Which one should I learn? Numerous articles try to rationally account for that, tell you the top ten tongues to learn, rank languages by utility or number of speakers or GDP of the countries its spoken in. Where are populations growing most? Which tongues will give you most ‘bang for your buck’?

German, a language I’ve spent a lot of my adult life learning, often features on such lists, an inclusion rendered in my experience ridiculous by the preference for Germans to opt for stilted international English in international or even just mixed-nationality environments. If there are fifteen people in a meeting and one doesn’t speak German, the Germans will do everything in English. A shame in my view.

In reality, this question can only be answered by a highly individual and subjective metric: Which language are you attracted to?

Spanish is a world language and Basque a tiny and regional one but if it’s the latter that more appeals to you, you will have better outcomes when learning it. Learning a language as an adult takes an enormous amount of effort and for all but the most perfectionist learner a good deal of humiliation, and what will get you through that process is an overweening love for the language and its language culture. You have to long to use the language at every opportunity.

It affects your attitude to your progress, too; my Chinese is much more rudimentary than my French, but after living with a Chinese person for seven years, I feel an affinity to the language and the Chinese people that means Chinese sits deeper, when I use my few phrases, to the French I speak every day – even tho my knowledge is miserable in comparison. I wouldn’t say I feel either particularly Chinese or French, but of those two options I definitely feel more Chinese.

Indeed, French is a supreme example of a language I’ve had to learn for career purposes. My mother is a Francophile, I was sent to French lessons as a child and, for the purposes of my interpreting career, I’ve been relentlessly incentivized to learn the language. It remains in my view the second most useful language professionally in the world. And yet, tho I speak the language fluently, I feel no particular affinity to the French-speaking world, and, tho I am determined to minimize both my mistakes and mispronunciations, I have no particular problem with people perceiving me as what I am, a foreigner who speaks decent French.

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I sometimes think of a universal language, and by that I don’t mean an artificial language aimed to facilitate human communication, but rather a language which compiles the best bits of all the others. A sort of ‘Now! That’s what I call language’ of tongues. The structures of this language would be up for grabs, as I think it’s hard to argue that there’s one particular grammar or other which humans relate to above others. Grammar is the water language users swim in. Whereas when it comes to vocabulary it appears clearer that there are certain words, certain combinations of sounds, that humans everywhere love to say; ‘Kaput’, ‘happy’, ‘Salsa’, ‘baby’, ‘OK’.

One such global word would almost certainly be ‘Ciao’. There’s barely a language which doesn’t make use of this salutation one way or another. The Italians say ‘Ciao’ at least twice a conversation, the French say ‘Tchao’, the Germans say ‘Ciao ciao’ (spelling it with ‘Tschao’), which my Dad found exceptionally poncey when I visited having picked it up in Germany. Heck, even the British say ‘Ciao’, though it is a bit Ab Fab-coded.

What explains the success of this little word? What drives its intrepid nature? It has positive connotations, of course, of Italy, of summer, of Marcello Mastroianni and una passeggiata through the village en famille. As for the sound of the word, it too has a certain charge, that ‘ch’ (an unvoiced postalveolar affricative, as you might know) moving through to the open vowel ‘ow’. It’s a fun word, always up for a good time, impossible to say miserably. Try saying it aloud now; it’s the vocabulary equivalent of the Mighty Boosh joke about it being impossible to be sad in a poncho.

The etymology of the word reveals slightly heavier connotations. The word originally stems from Venetian dialect’s s-ciào vostro, meaning ‘I am your slave’, though apparently it did not attach itself solely to slave-master dynamics for long; the more common meaning soon ending up more as ‘I am at your service’. Fans of Bavarian dialect will know that ‘Servus’, that ubiquitous southeast German greeting, has much the same meeting via Latin. To go further back still, both Servus and that Venetian s-ciào derive from the Latin sklavus, or slave, referring to the Eastern European origin of most slaves in the Ancient World.

Simplified from s-ciào to ciao, the word has been spread first across Italy and then over the Americas and the New World by Italian immigrants. In Cuba, for example, ciao has apparently replaced adiós with all its religious connotations. Seeing the word’s spread, it strikes me once again as odd that Italian is not a world language, given its speakers willingness to speak their language in all situations. An Italian friend has a pithy explanation for this: ‘We lost the war.’

As for ‘ciao’s’ entrance into English, Ernest Hemingway’s 1929 novel ‘A Farewell to Arms’ is credited with bringing the word into the language, which explains its working title of ‘Ciao, arms’. Hemingway spells the word ‘Ciaou’ in said book, but nonetheless earns through its promotion another credit mark to his name along with his one about the old bloke and the ocean, being nice about Henry James and that funny thing he almost said to F Scott Fitzgerald about rich people.

In recent years the word has received a further boost of life via the operatic Tarantino-esque serial ‘La Casa del Papel’ (‘Money Heist’) and its persistent use of the chorus of the wartime partisan song ‘Bella ciao’, whose chorus could be read as tribute to the virtues of this swashbuckling word.

One of the features of ciao is of course that, like Hebrew shalom, Hawaiian aloha or Korean anneyong, it is a word used as both greeting and goodbye. Ahoj, that calling card of the Czech navy, is another. This doubling has a certain efficiency, tho it must make translating ‘Hello Goodbye’ into those languages a pain – the song is presumably known in Hawaiian as ‘Aloha Aloha’, as is the 1980s’ wartime sitcom ‘Hello Hello’. We use ‘Ciao’ just to say goodbye in English, as in Macedonian and oddly enough in Dutch. Not like the Dutch to refuse a two-for-one.

It’s amusing how we go through phases of saying things. I’m quite keen on ‘growth mindset’ at the moment, and I resolved at the start of the year to drop in the odd use of ‘Don’t get it twisted’. I never fail to enjoy saying ‘It takes all sorts to make a world’ and a few years back I had a brief affair with the phrase ‘Not worth the candle’. And for someone with little lived experience of tinkers, I sure do love describing things as not being worth a ‘tinker’s cuss’. In short, I’m fussy about language, which might be one definition of a writer.

Yet even as my speech cycles through fads ol’ ‘ciao’ remains an evergreen. It’s a word which never fails to get the job done. ‘Ciao’ is like a band who you don’t listen too often but are always great when you do, the Yo La Tengo of words. I am sure that in our universal language of the most-loved words ‘Ciao’ will take up a place of honour.

For now then, Ciao, and welcome all to this, the fourth season of ‘Stiff Upper Quip’. This is how I want to greet you, my hands outstretched, delight on my face, my lips forming a big happy ‘Ciao! Ciao, amici, ciao!’ I look out on you all as I wait for you to take up your seats for another series. I am not ready to ‘ciao’ you all out again for a good while yet.  

In the European quarter of Brussels next to the buildings only a mother could love you see young men and women, impeccably dressed in suits and coats, a little too young for senior roles but already very much dressed for them. They hold doors open, they vape outside, they conduct themselves with a fresh-faced elegance. And when you catch wind of what they are saying to each other, for all their varied countries of origin, they are speaking flat American English. Apart from the Italians. They are speaking Italian.

It’s the same everywhere across Europe; indeed, it seems to be much more the case now than when I lived in Berlin twenty years ago that it’s perfectly acceptable to live in a major European capital and do all your business in English. The Belgian case is to a certain extent particular for, as with any multilingual polity, the tension between different languages finds a readymade solution in the use of an auxiliary language. The question of whether to speak French or Dutch in Brussels is to some extent resolved in the choice of an unrelated third language, one without an intrinsic connection to either Wallonia or Flanders.

Yet it is precisely this mode de vie – displaced ‘rootless cosmopolitans’, passing through societies and failing to integrate into them, participants in a cultural homogenization which sees the centre of every European city dominated by the same four or five big chains – that the critics of globalization claim to dislike. It also remains the case that the driving medium of this is the English language, the closest the world has come yet to a true lingua franca.

What is it it that post-liberals and anti-globalists claim to seek? A world of people better rooted in communities, of people with deep connection to places, of those places themselves being well-made, and of the retention of history and tradition. An English-only world threatens all of that; therefore, by definition, to argue against it in English is like trying to sober up in a brewery. The charge, long levelled at the English, that they go abroad and don’t learn the local language, is by now by no means confined to them; increasingly, everybody who goes abroad doesn’t learn the local language.

At best such workers stay for a few years, making their contribution in international English before moving on to the next global staging post. Often their children go to schools where they are instructed in international English too which they speak with flat American accents. This is a state of affairs necessitated in part by the practicalities of global collaboration; most people, I would imagine, would take breakthroughs in international medical research conducted in English over the maintenance of smaller national languages. Nonetheless, it remains the case that to argue against globalization in English is a fish making the moral case against water.

Yet the increasing use of English isn’t entirely unrelated to populist currents in Europe, the kind of destructive politics which might one day make a world of international teams of cancer researchers impossible. English is above all now the language of European elites, moving around, living in each other’s countries, leaving their national tongues behind. Indeed, many such people I meet display an unmistakeable contempt against their native language or the concept of speaking something other than English – of being associated with the ‘parochial’ culture of their own country.

For most it is a simple matter of necessity. Something that native English speakers rarely seem to consider is that if you are a born into a European country which speaks a minority European language, Lithuania or Slovenia say, you will have to give up your own language to have a career of any international standing. You will have to give up on your most precise and sophisticated tool of expression – your own native tongue. And, even in the case of languages with larger bases of speakers, such as German or French, there is an increasing sense of social pressure to be seen speaking English. Indeed that even speaking bad English is better than none.

Can you imagine how English speakers would cope with that? In avowedly monolingual England, one of the places where foreign words seem to induce genuine panic in people, imagine if it became necessary to force people as adults to communicate in a new language, to struggle with unfamiliar sounds and, crucially, to not necessarily always be steering the conversation. Yet that is the fate facing thousands of people across the world today and, even within national spheres itself, the field where the national language is used is increasingly restricted. German companies are notorious for, if a meeting contains one non-German speaker, conducting the whole meeting in English; through such an approach, national language cultures inevitably become marginal.

I struggle with this as an English-language writer. To write in English is, whatever you say in the language itself, to automatically to further this state of affairs. English-language writing can never be entirely confined to a local audience; by default, everyone who writes in English is an internationalist. Of course, writers who’ve grown up with English use it in a different way to those who’ve learnt it, often with more colour, shade and character, often better able to innovate in words. Granted, English itself is a dizzingly varied language; writing in, say, Nigerian pidgin is not to express yourself in the world tongue. Yet for every BBC newsreader expressing themselves in their native accent there is a case like Sanas, the California start-up which offers real-time standardisation of English accents for those from outside the Anglosphere working in call centres , replacing the apparent stigma of a non-native accent with ‘normal’ American.

In my view a writer trying to write well is always making a case for the language they write in, and so a good English writer, however avowedly local in their idiom or concerns, is inevitably making the case for more English, at a time when the language has already grown exceptionally dominant.

The logic that flows from this, then, is that there is no greater argument in favour of localism and preserving tradition an Anglophone writer could make than deciding not to write in English at all. This doesn’t mean quixotically adopting a foreign language – there would be an element of perversity to that, and one reason I support multilingualism is that people’s self-expression is inevitably more complex and sophisticated in their native tongue – but in the spirit of the South African writer JM Coetzee’s decision to let his recent novels appear in Spanish translation first. Could you imagine if JK Rowling wrote a new Harry Potter book and said, well, it will be first available for a year only in Swedish? Thousands would scramble to learn the language the next day.

It's a strange world, our current one, in terms of language use; on one hand, English has never been so dominant; on the other, materials for languages and even very much minority ones have never been easier to attain. I do think a certain responsibility comes to native English speakers with this. The rest of the world has no question about which language to learn first; English will by far get them the most bang for their buck (and, in the spirit of that buck, very much American English too). English more than any other language will see them progress in their careers and open up opportunities across the world.

Yet English native speakers already know the world language. Therefore they are much freer about what if any language they choose to learn; whatever the status of English, it’s certainly worth learning something given how essential multilingualism is to the human condition. Anglophone natives might learn Chinese, one of the key languages of the 21^st-century, or Spanish, another global language, or the emerging lingua franca of the African Great Lakes region, Swahili. But if your politics are communitarianism and postliberalism, surely the obvious thing is to learn a smaller language; to learn Basque, or Scots Gaelic, or Breton; to try and keep these threatened languages alive as a friend of the culture. Or even to delve back into Ancient Languages and preserve the cultural underpinnings of the traditionalism they claim to admire. Yet instead of cashing in this ‘native speaker premium’, Anglophone anti-globalists on left and right tiresomely cycle concepts around the world language; a language which itself all the time upholding the distance between elites and ordinary people they claim to despise.

It’s often remarked that the modern world lacks charm and it’s true, once you’ve sat in your fifteenth bubble tea shop in a major European city you could be anywhere. Part of this lack of charm, I contend, is the dominance of bad English; that so many people today communicate and do their business in a language they speak imperfectly or without passion, subject to the inevitable gravitational pull of modish concepts. So many people spend their days speaking a language in which they sound so dumb. A more multilingual Europe would be more parochial, might find it harder to get things done quickly, but it would perhaps more full of character and certainly more full of tradition; it would be, in short, more the kind of Europe communitarians claim to want.

I am, in this respect, certainly doing my bit. I speak three large European languages and am currently learning the smallest language I have yet, Dutch – though, with 22 million speakers, it’s hardly on the list with Occitan (circa 200,000). I ask people to speak their native languages with me wherever possible, though I don’t have to do that; I could just as easily ‘get by in English’ and drift around in a pleasant anodyne internationalism. I insist in part because of my own professional motivations but also because I find international English extremely boring to converse in. I acknowledge our world has need of a global language to facilitate communication, but it’s no more than that, a tool, lacking aesthetics, cultural connections and frequently, sophistication.

This so-called ‘globish’ is only tangentially related to what is called English in the Anglophone world. But that terminological overlap, that both these things, English at home and abroad, are called the same thing, leaves those unhappy with globalization in the English-speaking world unable to understand what their language is doing at present, for good or ill, the thousands of displacing and deracinating conversations which occur in the language each day; it is entirely paradoxical to argue for a greater sense of place and cultural continuity and also be happy to travel all over the world speaking English as a universally understood language is an inherently homogenizing idea. If you want to take a stand against globalization, learn Welsh.

Many thanks to the five(!) people who converted to paid subscriptions last week. Your support for this newsletter is invaluable, and keeps it going. I encourage more of you to join them and, even if funds don’t allow, please do spread the word to potential SUQers.

Picture the scene: A young man at a café, eating invariably a Schwarmateller (kebab meat plate), reading a thick volume of the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (Auslöschung, one of his longest novels, to be precise). Sitting outside on the street he is asked for directions, which he gives in German with a mild foreign accent. His interlocutor switches immediately to heavily accented English, to which the young man says: ‘Excuse me. I’m reading Thomas Bernhard. Do you really think I can’t speak German?’ As he strongly reiterates this single point, the interlocutor grows embarrassed, and asks him to let the matter lie. It isn’t very chill.

That young man – in the interests of full disclosure, me – had a good many experiences like that. Some of them were worse. Once, at a comedy night he had in part organized in order to improve his German, and which he hosted in both English and German, he is told by one of the featured comedians ‘In meinem Land ist es meine Wahl, was für eine Sprache ich spreche’, ‘In my country it’s my choice what language I choose to speak’. When told by the young man that he had requested in advance to speak German, the comedian asked him if he were drunk.

He didn’t let up, he kept going, and he met many kind and welcoming people who spoke German and later French with him as he made his way through his youth. How else did he end up fluent in both languages? Yet he always remembers those experiences, and when speaking his hard-won tongues the fear that people are going to switch to English is always with him. No matter how good he gets in foreign languages, they still do it to him, often without warning and seemingly without prompt.

Not everyone is as determined to learn foreign languages as me. I’ve learnt two languages to fluency as an adult, and from the moment I started doing so I’ve had people telling me I couldn’t do it. Or indeed shouldn’t.

I was good at languages at school, although there’s a limit to how good you can get at a Midlands Comprehensive school in the mid-90s. I remember in my German class once pronouncing the Umlaut in the word fünf accurately and bringing the whole class to laughter. It’s good, said the teacher Ms. Chisholm, he’s putting some expression into it. But it wasn’t enough to convince me to continue learning German, a language and nation against which there was a general prejudice against in the East Midlands of the time; indeed, there was a general hostility to learning any languages at all.

Still, I’ve done OK, and in a way I find it more impressive to have achieved having learnt languages to a high standard through my own volition and commitment rather than being born into the natural advantages of a multilingual education. Becoming multilingual has been an act of pure will, of a refusal to acquiesce to a cultural expectation of monolingualism.

Not everyone is as determined as me though – if you want me to do something the surest way to make it happen is to tell me I can’t do it – and, when the inevitable switch to English I’ve been describing occurs, they’ll give up. This is particularly in face of a Europe which is increasingly obsessed with learning and doing things in (American) English.

It’s worth saying that a lot of contiental Europeans genuinely surprised to learn that many English speakers learning another language, and indeed foreigners more generally, ever find the attempt to speak English with us unwelcome. It’s meant, they say, to make you feel at home, but of course the effect is the opposite; being spoken to in English while abroad, and that usually in weird American English, often makes you feel very much more an outsider. It’s much worse if it happens when you actually live in the place and are learning the local language. Rather than included, it makes you feel held at arms’ length, simultaneously pandered to and patronized. Certainly, I’ve never found expats abroad who welcome it.

Without the local language, you also never really understand what’s going on; I’m aware from personal experience that Germans who speak good English, themselves an educated minority, tend to often offer a somewhat rose-tinted and liberal vision of their country when explaining it in the world’s lingua franca.

Now of course you could genuinely not speak the local language or not want to, but that’s simply not always the impetus for this switch happening. I remember being in a bike shop in Freiburg, chatting away in German and suddenly the owner suddenly just switched to American English. When I told him I found what he was doing rude, he gets outright annoyed with me. This scenario is more about dominance and assertion of power than extending welcome and, at root, is about showing off. What makes that example so bizarre to me is that I was the customer – it was surely my right to choose the language I wished to consume in, and the owner still preferred this almost pathological cleaving to American English. Something really weird is going on there.

I think another thing Europeans don’t understand now – and I realize I can’t speak for everyone here – is that English speakers don’t have quite the same sense of their language belonging to them, ‘nostra lingua’ as the Italians say, precisely because our language has become the world language. English is, as Eddie Izzard says, now ‘open source’; it is for everyone to do what they will with, and my, don’t they.

Most of the people who speak English today have never spent any real time in an Anglophone environment. I read in a book years ago - it was, if I remember, 'The Bluffer’s Guide to the English’ - that English’s status as the world language would make English people feel ‘cosy’. Well, to be honest, being spoken to in bad American English in, say, Amsterdam, has never made me feel ‘cosy’. If people wanted me to make me feel ‘cosy’, I guess they’d have to speak to me in the specific slightly Brummie, slightly Yorkshire tones of my native Nottingham accent, which is sadly not much heard beyond the borders of the East Midlands.

I should emphasise that I’ve also had absolutely brilliant experiences speaking new languages; my old flatmate telling me how great it was to live with a foreigner ‘der richtig Deutsch schwätzt’, a comedian in a bar telling me that ‘she’d never met a foreigner who spoke German so cleanly’. Moments I’ll take to my grave. I’m aware too that English learners have their own imperatives, that good English for them leads to career advancement and social prestige in an extremely quantifiable way1. Plus, in terms of using specifically German, I’m caught up in the particular German pathologies about representing Germany and its language to the world; in their private moments, I’ve had Germans tell me how much they appreciated my fluency in the language, and many Germans who’ve patiently helped me get there.

But still, it hurts. It hurts when the switch into English comes, with the inference that my capacity in the foreign language isn’t good enough, that I’ve failed my audition. It is inevitable experienced as a humiliation. If the logic is it’s because I speak the foreign language with an accent and occasional grammar mistakes well, that’s almost every non-native speaker of English too. It’s just that English speakers are too used to people speaking their language to bother correcting foreigners; that though is a cultural convention, not a verdict on quality. If you start correcting foreigners, though, they do tend to be thankful, though I think they might just be a little less bolshy about their English as a result. Certainly, the absence of Britain from the institutions of the European Union seems to have removed any residual reluctance about speaking English within them.

Anyway, I’m having an ongoing great experience with my spouse’s family, who are richly rewarding my attempts to speak Chinese2, allowing that they have nothing else to speak to me. This is, I think, the way that it should be, and the way it is for people who move to Anglophone environments; sink or swim. Learn our language - we don’t have another one. In all my years in the UK, I think I was only ever in one place (a butchers’ shop in London) where people genuinely didn’t speak English, and even then they knew the word for ‘lamb chops’.

Nonetheless, I do want to say to non-English speakers; when you’re faced by someone trying to learn your language, whatever your own capacities in English, don’t switch to the world language unless you really have to. Maybe ask them first if they seem to be struggling. You’re not helping them as much as you think for, even if they’re truly rudimentary in their language use, they’re not going to get better unless they get the chance to actually use the language3. And of course if they lose all confidence they're not going to try.

Aside from all the interpersonal frustration of this, there are bigger issues at stake. Don’t you want to preserve a language culture? A world where we all speak our local languages with our tribes, and then bad American English with foreigners, sounds tribal, undynamic and flat. It rules out the possibility a foreigner can enter a new language environment ad do something creative there for one. In this globalized world, we should be encouraging anyone who wants to row back against the dominance of the world having one and only language which counts, especially if they’ve already stood against the tide as a native speaker of English in trying to learn a language at all.

Personally, I never seem to learn. Paid for by the Belgian government, I’m starting Dutch class this February and the Dutch are amongst the most notorious nation out there for this kind of switching. So I’m going to take the radical step of banking on Dutch directness and asking, straight up: ‘Kun je Nederlands met me spreken?’

I also have a few free codes if you can’t afford it. Just message me.

One of the odder aspects about growing older is that our lives become shaped by decisions we made a good deal of time ago and sometimes can’t even remember why. In my case one of those was a great drive to be able to speak another language.

My particular case shows that it is eminently possible to do this even in adulthood. I started relatively late, committing to learning German at the age of 21; my ambition was to speak four languages fluently by the age of 30. Today, at the age of 40, after considerable efforts, I speak three fluently and have picked up bits of others too, so let’s charitably say I am 3.5 of the way to my goal. I am also not seeing a noticeable decline in my ability to acquire new tongues, not least as the connections between other European languages are becoming ever clearer to me.

I should say that doing this is caveated on showing a great deal of commitment to the task. I lived abroad for most of my 20s and resolved not to leave the country where I was living until I had mastered its native tongue. Once fluent in German, I acquired a Masters in Conference Interpreting and, after many years as a freelance language professional, recently secured a full-time position as a staff interpreter.

Languages then have been for me both profession and passion. I’ve learnt them seriously, with the aim to reach a high level, and I’ve made career choices to facilitate that. If your question is ‘Should I learn a few phrases to use on holiday’, have at it; it won’t make much of a difference to you apart from getting a few more smiles at airports.

What I’m talking about is learning languages to use them – with an acknowledgement that doing so is an enormous time investment and the work of many years, particularly in the absence of an easy opportunity to use them on a daily basis.

But before you start such a journey: Should you?

Clearly there are advantages and disadvantages here and also disadvantages within the advantages. Some of them are the particular disadvantages associated with learning languages in a culture like the UK which doesn’t centre language learning in the mainstream, and where doing so puts you in a minority; others are the inherent disadvantages and benefits of being a multilingual person.

Let’s alternate through some pros and cons to learning a language.

1)     It expands your frame of reference. Having another language allows you access to the cultural products of another language; its films, its literature, the songs sung in it1. More importantly it creates a constant connection to those who speak said language. Of course, members of different language groups react differently to your displaying knowledge of their native codes; Germans and Dutch people, for example, can be notably skeptical of attempts to learn their languages. Usually though people are delighted at any attempt to communicate with them in their native tongue which of course, opens up a new world of experience for you as a learner.

2)     Access to that world though can have the effect of slightly distancing you from your own tribe, especially if said tribe isn’t overly familiar with the business of learning a foreign language. (With fluent French and German I’ve regularly been introduced as a sort of language freak at UK parties; meanwhile on the continent, I’d just be Swiss). I use the example that in the English-speaking world a window is objectively a window; a fusion between signifier and signified has been achieved. Whereas for a language learner, you hear fenster or fenêtre or окно at the same time as you hear window; you are aware that window is just an arbitrary collection of sounds to designate the particular concept of a glass pane looking to the outside world. This creates a slight distancing effect between you and how language is used in monolingual societies, not least from the terror with which English people often react at the idea of speaking another, or even briefly not understanding, language.

3)     Money. It’s often said that having a foreign language increases your earnings, and it’s true that languages open up a lot of potential paid activities for you, from translation to tour guiding. Interpreting, which is language skills plus performance, is particularly well-paid, particularly at international institutions. Often the question is asked as to which language would be the most lucrative to learn, which is a false premise; the only language you can learn is one you are sufficiently interested in to spend the time learning. Failing that, Chinese.

4)     Unfortunately, language skills are generally poorly understood and poorly remumerated in the UK. Employers view them rather than a ‘must’ as ‘nice to’ have. Indeed most employers don’t even understand the basic distinction between a native and a non-native speaker; I have for example frequently been offered jobs writing in German because my CV states that I translate from it. Of course, UK employers have also been reliant pre-Brexit on a vast pool of talented European graduates who wanted to live in London; we can only hope the premium on languages increases a little post-Brexit.

5)     Development of confidence and independence. This seems to me a fairly unmitigated benefit of successful language acquisition. If you’ve gone abroad and learnt a language to fluency, you gain an awful lot of confidence about what your capacities to do things are. Once you’ve phoned up the tax office in a foreign country and dealt with matters in a second language you can manage it in your own. In addition, becoming fluent also gives you the specific confidence that you can learn further languages; I can’t imagine many people have achieved fluency in a second language as an adult and been entirely content to leave it there.

6)     Yet there are limits to the fluency possible outside of a bilingual childhood, certainly phonetically, and even fortunate bilinguals often combine their native accents with shambolic grammar. After years of work, you are still short of that tiny native speaker premium, which can be greatly frustrating given that in certain aspects your knowledge of your target language exceeds its average native user. It leads you to a feeling of expending a great deal of effort only to hit a glass ceiling.

As I’ve written about before, you can easily end up not entirely belonging to any language culture, or rather instead belonging more to the large group of people who also find themselves in-between cultures, sympathetic to foreigners abroad, returned expats, and the Welsh.

The situation with languages in the UK is not good.

Generally, it’s a mixture of the rudiments of a few major European languages, stale puns on them (how can French children be in ‘pain’ or German children ‘Kinder’? The words are pronounced differently) and a few fossilized ideas about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (thanks, ‘Arrival’, for resurrecting that old canard). It all adds up to a fairly deficient picture of both the wider world and the properties of language itself, and it’s not something any of us should feel proud of.

It’s also more a product more of laziness than the malign; English is the world language and there’s no particular reason for its speakers to acquire anything else, aside from in order to have richer life and be a more excellent specimen of humanity. People are busy and you can hardly blame them from only acquiring the skills they need to get by, and UK workers just don’t see their careers advance with a foreign language in the way those abroad do learning good English.

Nonetheless, I wouldn’t advise English speakers to feel too cosy about English being the world’s lingua franca. For said lingua franca is really a competing translation of hundreds of native languages into English which are just about mutually comprehensible. Listened to at length, it is often not a language anyone could feel at home in or even much affection for, as this recent piece ably communicates. Indeed speaking a native English variety is to a degree an active impediment to communicating with speakers of international English.

I think most of us have some instinctive sense that speaking only one language is a bit crap. The irony of course is that it’s never been easier for anyone to acquire any which language they want. You could pop online and download a course in Iñupiaq right now. So as an English native you do have, whatever the state of the wider culture, the choice to take your own personal stand against monolingualism – and my own example, being a state-school kid who has grafted their way to fluency in several languages, surely indicates it’s possible with a certain willingness to stand out.

But my question today is whether that’s worth it. In answering, I would stress that learning languages is the normal thing to do. Most of the world’s population is multilingual; it’s monolingualism which is the minority state, albeit it’s difficult to assess the exact figures as to how much of the world population is monoglot. Specifically for English natives, it’s only English’s status as the world which makes whether to learn a language even a question; for the rest of the world, the matter of not only whether but which language to learn first is an absolute fait accompli2.

Billions of people across the world speak their own language and bad English. That means those billions have the experience of trying and flailing to make themselves understood, of being in a situation where they simply do not have the linguistic resources available to communicate what they mean. And yet they try, taking on the deep humility of the learner.

That is why, above all, you should learn a language; to put yourself in the shoes of the billions of people who have to work every day in a language they may command only imperfectly. That’s too fundamental a human experience to miss out on. You can’t just swan about in your monolingualism waiting for everyone else to make the effort to serve you, unless you’re happy with being a snob.