Please don't switch to English with me
On a persistence annoyance
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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?’
In addition, when it comes to asking what the first foreign language for non-native speakers of English to learn is, there isn’t really much debate about what language will prove most useful.
Bizarrely enough, though English knowledge in my spouse’s family is limited, one of her cousins has a decent command of Dutch. Chatting away with her in Dutch in China is surely an argument for the value of learning even lesser-spoken languages.
This is the vicious circle a lot of language learners get caught in; they’re not getting the practice so they don’t get better, but because they’re no good nobody wants to practice with them. That, more than anything, explains the foreigners you meet after years in places who speak no more than a few words of the local language. It also shows the importance of, certainty at early levels, taking formal lessons.
Interesting - men are much more likely to do this than women, in my experience. As you say, it's about power and dominance. And you could always learn Welsh, a language in which very few will do this to you ;-)
"This is the vicious circle a lot of language learners get caught in; they’re not getting the practice so they don’t get better, but because they’re no good nobody wants to practice with them.”
At least for the man who spoke heavily accented English, might not this be the root of things? Perhaps the switching isn't about *your* language capabilities at all but rather theirs. To give an example, I've seen fellow Americans who are learning Spanish switch to Spanish at a Mexican restaurant, upon hearing the server speak English with an accent. They don't do it thinking that the server needs help, but rather because they are excited by (and seizing) the opportunity to practice their own skills in a non-native language.