A case for multilingualism
A response to Sam Wilkin
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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.
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 21st 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.