I walked into a McDonald’s in Germany and realized I didn’t know how to ask for six Chicken McNuggets.
“Um,” I began.
“What would you like to order?” said the cashier, defaulting to English.
The minute I got back to my table, feeling very silly, I pulled up Google Translate on my phone. All I’d needed to know was sechs. Sechs Chicken McNuggets, bitte und danke, and yet here I was, a tourist who’d taken not a moment of my life to learn the most basic of phrases to complete the most basic of orders in a country where English is not the dominant language.
Europe is a linguistically diverse continent where English has become the lingua franca, the easiest way to communicate when the Schengen Zone has opened borders to passport-free travel and the European Union recognizes 24 official languages. Being a native English speaker has given me a wild advantage in communicating with much of the world, a privilege that I’ve always been aware of but had never really hit home until I came to study abroad. English is the default in shops and more broadly, in large cities, when communicating in the local language proves difficult. It’s just a skill assumed of you; bilingual proficiency isn’t special, either. A common question when talking with other students is “What other languages do you speak?” leading to my mumbling about mishaps with Japanese.
In France, where I am spending my semester, almost every student begins studying English around the age of 8, before adding a second language a few years later, well before I began learning French at the age of 14. Being exposed to different languages at a young age is quite advantageous: there’s a time frame, the critical (or sensitive) period, when a child is most adept at learning languages. It begins to decline around the age of 8 and continues through adulthood. That’s not to say adults can’t learn languages, just that it’s a lot harder for us, as we are less likely to twist our not-so-flexible brains around new phrases.
As an Anglophone it’s easy to get jealous, since we English-speakers are less likely to pursue other languages. I certainly didn’t see the value of multilingualism until I started high school French (solely to fulfill a school requirement). Since then, I’ve often been asked why I continue studying language beyond Georgetown’s language requirement.
Of course, it’s all a matter of perception. The French are, along with the English, ranked as the worst language learners in Europe. As someone with hazy memories of elementary school Spanish, I know firsthand that the critical period is useless when the pedagogy isn’t there. The difference in France, however, is that society emphasizes the importance of learning languages. Even if their English (or any other language) isn’t particularly good, people here will make an effort to use it when needed. It’s far from the “Oh, I studied ____ but can’t really speak it” you hear in America, and I can think of plenty of times where someone spoke to me in French, and I froze up, terrified of embarrassing myself.
Despite their openness to accommodating Anglophones, the French have high expectations when it comes to speaking French. Perhaps it comes from their lost status as the former lingua franca of the world, but there’s very much an attitude that if you come into this country, you’d better speak the language and speak it well. Not everyone will be mean, but almost every French learner does have a story about some condescending employee who treated them poorly because they forgot a word or didn’t nasalize their vowels. Still, I’ve been complimented multiple times, early into conversations, on my “very good French.” Here, it seems like a solid grasp of a foreign language is a prerequisite for kindness (in a country with low foreign fluency rates), yet successfully rising to this challenge is considered…impressive.
Such conflicting attitudes are frustrating for someone who has struggled to learn a language. But, the more that I think about it, don’t we emulate the same behaviors in America? We mock poor English but also acknowledge our own language’s difficulty. The difference is that we are the default. A European cashier can ring me up in German or English. As for the American cashier…well, I will never say that speaking English puts me at a disadvantage, or that America is an entirely monolingual nation. But our culture and our educational system, isolated from other languages yet conquering the world linguistically, holds so many of us back from finding the confidence, or even getting the education, to make that order in German.
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