I think it’s possible to acknowledge that ‘everybody speaks English nowadays’ and, if in a country where one doesn’t speak the language, contribute to that development while wishing that every world city didn’t have shopping centres full of H&M and Footlocker. I guess the globalisation of American English goes hand in hand with the globalisation of capitalism, and to acknowledge that doesn’t mean you have to like it. There is much to miss about the way Europe was in the 70s…..
Maybe I’m just becoming more like Meister Anton at the end of Hebbel’s ‘Maria Magdalena:’ Ich verstehe die Welt nicht mehr!
Agreed. I half have a theory that, as a generation grows up all entirely proficient in English from the get-go - and that's much more the case with Gen Z Europeans than even Millennial ones - that there'll be a tendency to more use and pride in national languages, not less. English will be assumed as a given anyway and the spectacle I often see in my interpreting work, of non-native speakers really struggling out of a sense that they have to be seen to speaking English, will recede. Or at the very least be replaced by more genuine multilingualism.
I think it’s possible to acknowledge that ‘everybody speaks English nowadays’ and, if in a country where one doesn’t speak the language, contribute to that development while wishing that every world city didn’t have shopping centres full of H&M and Footlocker. I guess the globalisation of American English goes hand in hand with the globalisation of capitalism, and to acknowledge that doesn’t mean you have to like it. There is much to miss about the way Europe was in the 70s…..
Maybe I’m just becoming more like Meister Anton at the end of Hebbel’s ‘Maria Magdalena:’ Ich verstehe die Welt nicht mehr!
Agreed. I half have a theory that, as a generation grows up all entirely proficient in English from the get-go - and that's much more the case with Gen Z Europeans than even Millennial ones - that there'll be a tendency to more use and pride in national languages, not less. English will be assumed as a given anyway and the spectacle I often see in my interpreting work, of non-native speakers really struggling out of a sense that they have to be seen to speaking English, will recede. Or at the very least be replaced by more genuine multilingualism.