English as a Unifying Language

So I’m back to Germany today (technically yesterday, but I was too tired to do anything but flop over and sleep), and after going to the supermarket, I sort of re-realized just how much American language and culture permeate Germany (and Europe in general). A large percentage of packing cartons for products in supermarkets have English instructions or shipping labels, “look” and “image” have both entered the standard German vocabulary (mostly in ads), C&A sells a shirt with “Eat me, baby” on it (with pictures of apples on it, too), and a large number of “hip” businesses have English words in their slogans and in many cases consist entirely of English. Examples: Forever19, Terracotta-arts and pots, and my favorite brand of peanut butter, “Real American Crunchy Style Peanut Butter” or something. Sadly I don’t have any of it at the moment, so I can’t be sure of the actual exact name.

On a cold morning in February, while waiting for the bus to the train station at about 6am, a man with luggage came up next to me, out of breath, sort of looked at me a for a bit, then looked at the schedules for a while, then back at me again. He began to speak, hesitated, then went on in very excellent English, “Have I missed the bus to the train station already?” I started laughing, simply because I hadn’t at all expected it to be English. Turns out he was a researcher from Puerto Rico working at the Max Planck Institut and was going to a conference of some sort. I find it, however, very interesting that his chances of finding a person who could speak English were really quite high. In my experience so far, I have not met even a single student (German student, I should clarify) at Universität des Saarlandes who could not speak at least reasonably good English.

So now let’s flip this around– what are the chances that a person from France, Germany, Spain, etc. (any of the larger European countries) could try that in America and have it work? Not that great, except in the case of Spanish, since approx. 12% of people living in the US can speak Spanish (reference). Of course it doesn’t really seem reasonable to make this comparison since Europe has such a large number of different languages–it simply isn’t feasible to expect an American to speak every (or even many) European languages (just as I wouldn’t expect a European or anyone else to know 4+ languages).

What percent of American college students (with English as their first language) can speak Spanish, and what percent of German college students (with German as their first language) can speak English? I don’t know the answer to the first question, but the second one I do know: a lot. 51% of the population can speak English, with many of those people concentrated in the younger age groups.

So what’s my point? Basically, I would argue that Americans need to start learning foreign languages to a greater extent. Just because you can usually get by with English shouldn’t mean that you only need English. We’re starting to see this already, since a pretty good portion of college students in the US can speak a second language to some extent. What we don’t have yet is the prevalence of second language instruction starting early in life, when it is far more effective.

And I’ll finish up with one more story; In December I went to a Couch Surfing meetup in Strasbourg. The theme was a “Three Country Meetup” – Switzerland, Germany, and France. The most prevalent language was by far French, since it was hosted in France, in a location also near to the French-speaking section of Switzerland. However, there were some cases such as follows:

Person 1: (in French) Hey I’m Person 1, how are you?
Person 2: /Blank stare
Person 1: (in French) Oh, no French. Ok.
Person 2: (in German) You speak German?
Person 1: /Blank stare (in French, of course)
Person 2: (in English) Let’s just speak English then, eh?
Person 1: (also in English) Yeah, would make sense.
Person 3 (me): lol

There were quite a few people there who couldn’t have talked to each other had they not known English. In that regard, I think it is really quite wonderful that one language has taken on the roll of a unifying language. If you want to talk to people in other places and want to have the best chances of communicating with the greatest number of people, English is arguably the way to go. I don’t think that this is necessarily a good or bad thing, simply the result of the past couple hundred years of history (not to say that we haven’t done some bad stuff in those couple hundred years).

Final note: the American xenophobes who fear a bilingual or multilingual America have no idea what it’s like to live in a nation with this level of prevalence of an outside language. Pretty much the only reason we have gotten by with such a mono-language culture is because everyone else has adopted English as an international language and because of our geographically isolated location. More on that later.

Off to go cook myself some Merguez with Tabasco and a baguette and some Laphroaig I bought today (on sale, only 22 euro!)

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