English as a cultural binder

[auntieannie]

I am a French-speaking Swiss and since I learned "High German" (Germany's German as opposed to any of the swiss-german dialects) at school as well as english and that my German-speaking Swiss counterpart learned a bit of french and a lot of english, we usually end up speaking English as it is easier.

When I visited India, I spoke to many people on the train and was really surprised when conversations between Indian people of different regions were conducted in English. They all told me it was out of politeness, in the sense that there are so many local languages in India, not counting regional dialects, that people who knew English would speak english to someone unless they knew the other spoke the same language/dialect as they did.

Even my friends' cook - who didn't speak English, knew Telugu (Andhra Pradesh's language), Tamil, Kannada and Marathi!

Do you know of any other such examples?

[Deleted]

English is the common language of most international companies, and it is truly remarkable to see how the various people use and misuse it. In my own company, the best English speakers are always from the poorest countries where they have 'learned' that their own language is worthless and that English is an absolute necessity to succeed in life. People from the richer more important countries have much bigger difficulties in English.

However, I have been at enough international meetings to know that sub-cliques can quickly form, for example among French speakers, with the strange attitude that "we're obviously superior because our little group can speak in a less common language, and look at them all wondering what we are talking about." In my own company, there are usually Arabic and Hindi groups as well, probably saying the same things.

[bjd]

People from the richer more important countries have much bigger difficulties in English.


If you don't consider the Scandinavian countries or the Netherlands in that group. Not only is their language teaching better than in France or elsewhere in more southern Europe, these countries have small populations. Many scientific and other books are not translated into their languages so they use English textbooks, cartoons on TV in the Netherlands are shown in the original version with Dutch subtitles. Movies are subtitles and not dubbed.

[Deleted]

True, I didn't mean that all of the countries were poor, but the languages only spoken by a few million people are "worthless" in international surroundings. Not only that, in countries like the Scandinavian countries or the Netherlands, foreign films and television programs are not dubbed, so it is an immense benefit for learning other languages, even if the viewers didn't bother to go to school. This has nothing to do with personal preference but simply because it is too expensive to dub things into such minor languages. Only movies for small children are dubbed, and that is subsidized by the government.