Blog Day 26 of 30: Some People Just Can’t Do It
A tweet by Gary Lineker leads me down a rabbit hole of the arrogance of the English-speaking world.
Hello again everyone! Day 26 now, we’re creeping ever closer to the end. For the first time in a little while I actually have a topic in mind which I’m very very interested in talking about as a Trilingual Boi, so I’ll cut the pleasantries short and get straight into it.
Diego Maradona died on Wednesday, and football players and celebrities alike poured in their tributes throughout the day. Gary Lineker, the former Barcelona striker and current advocate for Walker’s Crisps, shared a video from before his retirement where he exchanges a few words in Spanish with Maradona, who seems to be welcoming him into some kind of campus full of Argentinian footballers. It’s very nice and shows that Maradona was a genuinely friendly bloke who liked to make everyone he met feel at home. In the replies below the video, however, is the following brief argument:
Obviously, this is the typical silly Twitter conflict which are a dime a dozen amidst the replies to any popular tweet. For a bit of context to it all, Lineker learned Spanish while playing for Barcelona, whereas the aforementioned Gareth Bale — the Welsh football superstar who moved to Real Madrid in 2013 — is alleged to have never bothered learning a single word of the language throughout his seven-year spell in Spain. The first reply from Mr. Hurley, “Some people just can’t do it. Not everyone has the capacity to learn a new language,” really got on my nerves for some reason, although at the time I wasn’t completely sure why. I’ve spent the last couple of days mulling over the argument of ‘it’s hard to learn languages so we shouldn’t expect it from British people’ vs. ‘it’s refreshing and great and impressive for a Brit to learn a new language,’ and I think I’ve come to a conclusion as to where I stand: I disagree with both sides.
I’ll give the most concise version of my thoughts in two sentences, then will justify (probably via a long-winded ramble) why I feel that way.
1. Forgiving British people for not having learnt the language of the foreign country where they live, while simultaneously ridiculing immigrants to the British Isles for not having a good command of the English language, is hypocritical bollocks and an unfortunate relic of British Imperialism.
2. Likewise, lavishing praise on those few Brits who do learn a foreign language perpetuates an unhealthy view of language learning as some kind of niche and mysterious hobby, rather than something just as fundamental and necessary as any other aspect of national culture.
I understand that I have my biases and my blind spots here. I’ve been in love with learning languages since I was 12, and I get that it’s completely unreasonable for me to expect that the general public should find verb conjugations or grammatical exceptions interesting because — for the most part — they just aren’t any craic at all. For the last couple of months I’ve been teaching English to kids who, in the majority of cases, don’t give a shit. Therefore I don’t mean to sound preachy or smarmy in the words to follow whatsoever, although I do want to remain as informative and clear as possible because I think that — for the most part — native English speakers quite simply do not understand just how backwards the glorification and exotification of learning a second language really is.
The positive implications of promoting foreign-language learning are limitless — chief among them is the fact that it would finally give the majority of us anglophones some empathy regarding just how hard it is for non-native speakers to get by in a world which is utterly dominated by English. When you’ve grown up in an English-speaking household, naturally you end up capable of speaking your own language more fluently and quickly than any other. Likewise, if you live in the same place for your whole life, you pick up your accent and a plethora of little idiomatic phrases without even realising.
We tend to neglect two things amidst all this: firstly, that for a non-native speaker the speed and unique detail of any given English dialect can take decades to learn, and even then it’s impossible to become truly fluent and aware of every single little rhythm and special phrase, not to mention the differences between every accent in each country.
Secondly, we neglect that these sorts of small details exist for every single language in the world, not just in our little English-speaking bubble. I’ve been learning French and German for almost 10 years now, and I’m still nowhere near understanding the small filler words, or the slang, or the funny expressions, or the way the language changes depending on the region I’m in. In all likelihood, I’ll never fully get there — once you’ve outgrown the period of your early childhood where your brain is like a sponge, soaking up every piece of information it can get, fully acclimatising to another language is incredibly difficult. However, by virtue of suffering the consequences of just how hard it is in French and German, I now constantly make sure to speak more slowly and to never lose patience with a non-native English speaker when I’m at home. Making sure everyone goes through this experience would give the ‘It’s Are Country, Speak Are Language!’ brigade a bit of a reality check, hopefully.
One of the more common defences of the Speak Are Language legion when they’re presented with the idea of perhaps broadening their own horizons is that, as Mr. Hurley said in the screenshot earlier on, not everyone has the capacity to learn another language. I have no idea what this bloke’s view on Them Immigrants is, of course, but certainly I do think he’s at least ignorant of the millions upon millions of people for whom acclimatising to a foreign language has simply been necessary in order to survive. The ‘not everyone has the capacity’ argument is usually wheeled out in order to justify the blind, arrogant stubbornness of those who expect everyone else to adapt to their own ways of life, and that’s without even mentioning that it’s simply not true. Did the bigwigs of the British Empire stop to think that not everyone has the capacity to learn a new language when they put an English test in their colonial Rule of Law to separate the masters from their subjects? What about when they imposed the English language upon their new colonies’ justice and education systems? Of course, this hypocrisy extends right up into the present day — we’re happy to compliment our bohemian British mates who spend a year learning Italian on Duolingo or stutter out a ¿Qué me recomienda? at a restaurant in Mallorca, but simultaneously so many of us in the British Isles will laugh at a Polish migrant’s funny accent or tendency to get their words jumbled up, all the while ignoring that both the friend and the Pole are trying to do the exact same thing.
There’s a fairly good chance that I’m preaching to the choir based on my friends and family being pretty progressive people, and I understand that, but I thought it was worthwhile to at least draw attention to these often unconscious biases that many of us native English-speakers hold. If there’s one thing that it might be nice to take from this, even if you don’t have any qualms with my point of view, it’s that it’s never too late to learn (or re-learn) another language. If you weren’t brought up speaking a certain language, it’ll be impossible to be totally fluent anyway, and I’m hoping that this blog entry shows that doing so is both a useful tool to have and a lesson in humility and empathy. Sure, foreign languages can be a hobby, but the real-life implications of speaking them outside of our English-centric bubble cannot be ignored.
