Everyone speaks English don’t they?

As a speaker of English it’s very easy to feel superior. After all, everyone speaks English don’t they? In a world that is increasingly anglophone, why bother learning another language?

A survey by travelsupermarket.com shows that although they love to travel, more than half of British holidaymakers claim there is no point making an effort to speak the local language because everyone speaks English. 45% of those questioned said that locals acted negatively when spoken to in English. Now there’s a surprise. Imagine their reaction when someone speaks to them in French, Spanish or even worse, in German.

Not everyone is so negative. The other half of those questioned were embarrassed by their paltry efforts, ranging from learning the basics and key phrases to using phrase books. 11% of people in the South West took time ahead of leaving to learn the language.

On the other side of the coin, there is considerable resistance in non-English speaking countries to the tidal wave. I lived in France for a long time where there was and still is much controversy about the influence of English words and culture. A law was passed in the 1990s imposing a quota of 40% French songs on radio stations.

The French have taken on English words, often incorrectly converting a verb into a noun, like a “parking”. They’ve incorporated expressions like “making of” and “coming out” as though they were single words, or perhaps more controversially “un Black” to avoid saying “un Noir”. The effects of saying things in a foreign language are strange sometimes.

The Académie Française huffs and puffs against all this but has had the odd success. It has been successful in replacing Walkman with “baladeur” and email with the Canadian expression “courriel”, having tried unsuccessfully to impose the rather silly “mél”.

But maybe all this is in vain, according to Google’s Eric Schmidt, English will no longer dominate in 5 years time. Everyone won’t be speaking English.

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Tagged as: Bilingual, English, French