"Why don't they just speak English?"

A language does not become a global language beause of its intrinsic structural properties, or because of the size of its vocabulary, or because it has been the vehicle of a great literature in the past, or because it was once associated with a great culture or religion....  A language has traditionally become an international language for one chief reason: the power of its people --especially their political and military power....  The history of a global language can be traced through the successful expeditions of its soldier/sailor speakers.

David Crystal, as quoted by David I. Smith in Learning from the Stranger


I remember posting about this on Tumblr once.  I'd seen a thread about English and why it was considered a "global language" if more people spoke Chinese than English and it was a very complicated language.  No one seemed to know the answer, so I put in my two cents, which read very similar to this quote.

People are not learning English because it is easy or because a lot of people speak it.  People are learning English because of the dominance that English-speaking countries have had in the world for the past three to four hundred years.  Starting with England and its colonial prowess (having beaten Spain and arguably the Dutch at their forays) and continuing with the United States in its technological dominance.


This quote in particular comes from a section in a chapter in ways people (ultimately anyone, but in this case white North Americans) fall short of being culturally accepting.  It follows sections on relying on tourism, explaining that simply visiting another country, while laudable, does not guarantee a gaining of cultural knowledge, as well as trusting technology, in that just because we are now more interconnected through the internet we are not necessarily less prone to cultural discomfort or gaffes related to not understanding where another person comes from.  This section deals with relying on English.

English is my native language.  It's the only language I had had any experience of until about the age of 10 when, after my parents began the process to begin missions work in France, we took French crash courses at the kitchen table.  When our visas were denied for France and doors opened to move to Spain instead, we had about five months of crash courses in Spanish.  I'd never studied another language in school, never met anyone from another country.  Culturally, I grew up in Wisconsin, an area of people from a predominantly Northwestern European background who had been there for a couple hundred years (probably 150 at least).  My parents were from New Jersey, my mother being half-Norwegian, as my grandfather moved to the US in the 1930s from Norway at the age of 16 and my grandmother being, well, "American", as she had ancestors who had been on this side of the Atlantic since the 1640s.  My father's family had moved around in the Northeastern United States a lot, and was actually born while my grandfather was working in Canada just across the border from Michigan.  Most of my mother's neighbors and classmates growing up in North Central New Jersey were either Jewish or Italian, most of whom were children of immigrants.  Wisconsin...was pretty white.  And fairly monocultural at that point.

Growing up, I never thought too much about other cultures.  My parents, due to their upbringing, had been really good about explaining to us that not everyone in the world is the same.  Granted, my parents were monolingual and still grew up in areas with a predominantly European background (though it should be mentioned that despite being "white", Italians and Jews have very little in common culturally aside for maybe a few generally "Mediterranean" characteristics), but they at least understood the value of their experiences as children.  Obviously, however, it was not until we moved to Spain and completely left our comfort zone of general American culture to truly understand and appreciate the variations in culture.

From a linguistic standpoint (as that is the theme of this post), being able to converse in languages other than English has not only broadened my scope on the world but has also given me a vast appreciation for being able to converse in languages other than my mother tongue.  Living in Spain, a country where around 3% of the population can comfortably carry on a conversation in English (it's a statistic I saw today, though I doubt its accuracy), forced me and the rest of my family to function in a language that we are not used to, that is foreign, and we had to learn that language or risk not being accepted by the locals.  And in the late '90s in the Basque Country, most people had never met anyone who was neither Basque nor Spanish.

I have never taken the ability to converse in a language other than English for granted.  No matter how many people I meet in Spain who tell me how lucky I am to be able to speak English as a native language, I will still never take for granted the ability to speak with them in their language.  My best friend, who is Spanish, is quite adept in English, but I have never, and probably will never, have an actual conversation with her in the language.  The common idea among Americans that if the rest of the world is learning English, evidenced by the globalization of the language via the internet, why should I have to learn another language, aggravates me to no end.  Since when has it been all about us?  In a lot of ways Canada has an edge on the US in this one because all children are expected to learn French, and while most people outside of Quebec don't actually speak the language well enough to carry a conversation in, they are at least familiar with the language as it appears on every single government document and on every product label found in stores.  Even with the gain in numbers of the Spanish-speaking population in the US and the language being found on labels there, it is not a required language.  Of course, neither is English, as the United States is probably the only country in existence without a defined official language (a fact usually either ignored or unknown).

My point is, English is not a language to be forced onto other people.  In order to succeed in the current world, English is the language of business and technology, and without a knowledge of it it is hard to get very far.  But it is not something to enforce.  No one should travel to another country and expect the natives of that country to always speak English, and to expect them to is disrespectful.  If they already do because they work and live in tourist areas and in tourism that's one thing, but complaining when visiting another country because they don't (or won't) speak English is juvenile, ignorant, and immature.

I have spent far too much time with people who think and behave like this.  Unfortunately it's not just Americans either, as the English in the South of Spain behave in a much similar fashion (only there it's worse, as when Americans travel, especially to Spanish-speaking countries, they tend to at least make some kind of effort to speak the local language, which the English do not tend to do, and they live there).  I feel like it's a condition that native English speakers have because of the fact that they grew up speaking a language people in most other countries have to go to school to learn, and still end up having a hard time with.  They go in with their air of superiority, their "I speak English so therefore I'm more powerful than you".  It drives me nuts.  Obviously once I visit a country that does not have a predominantly English or Spanish-speaking population (and to a lesser extent a French one, as I can get by in the language) I do usually have to resort to using English to communicate as best I can, but it is not something I wish to force upon anyone, and it is certainly not something I would ever think to complain about.  So they don't speak my language, fine, I don't speak theirs either, but I am in their country and therefore it is more my responsibility than theirs to communicate with them rather than them to me.

I don't think it's necessary to learn every single language on the planet to appreciate other languages and cultures better.  There are far too many for that.  But it's still far better to speak at least one other language than to only speak one and expect everyone else to use that language around you.  Sometimes I honestly wish I did not speak English as a native language.  I'm tired of this vergüenza ajena, as we say in Spanish, this shame by association, that I feel whenever native English speakers behave like this.  Thanks for giving all of us a bad name.