Many years ago when I was a Fulbright Scholar in Japan, I heard a joke I still find both funny and telling.
What do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks one language? An American.
I suspect that the Japanese relished that joke because they too are notoriously resistant to language diversity. But it is certainly an accurate reading of Americans’ language backwardness. We are the most linguistically-challenged people outside of—well, anywhere. Indeed, places we dismiss as “undeveloped” require native peoples to command several different languages at once.
I plead guilty. I am a pure American in this regard. Even the Spanish in which I was formally trained and competent some years ago is pretty much gone.
So when we travel abroad, we Americans are brought face-to-face with our linguistic disabilities. You can’t help but marvel at the facility of everyone you come into contact with in Europe. Northern Europeans—the Danes, the Fins, the Swedes—speak sounder English than most Americans. Workers in the travel industry, from hotel desk clerks to concierges to information people at kiosks wherever, speak competent English. Hotel maids speak three languages at me at once as they try to figure out whether I need a fresh towel; they’re much smarter than I.
The most amazing thing about the linguistic agility of Europeans is how quickly they can go from speaking to their companion in Italian or Spanish or Estonian to speaking to me in English, as in “Excuse me sir.” I seem to have some air about me that obliges people to “excuse me sir.” It certainly can’t be my physical size. I’m not a hostile person, as far as I know. I assume that they just know I can’t speak any other language. Maybe I have some otherwise inscrutable stamp on my forehead that says: “That’s right. I’m from the States. I can’t speak anything but Ohioan.”
You’d get the impression that this state of affairs makes global life easy for us lazy and language-deaf Americans. Everybody speaks English. Why should we go to all the hassle of learning?
But I’m not sure it’s that simple.
Tonight, I had dinner in London’s Soho. I felt like Indian food. I like Indian food. In fact, my neighbor at home is an Indian-American, and his brother owns that marvelous Indian kiosk at the North Market. I love going to Andy’s parties. He’s got lots of interesting friends, but Raj always caters, which makes it an event you can’t beat.
So I chose one place over about a half-dozen other Indian places in the district that I walked by. When I went in, I could hardly make out what my waiters were saying. I’m guessing that they’ve not been in London too long; that they’re first-generation immigrants who haven’t yet picked up the British accent. I had to ask them to repeat, and repeat, and repeat. And yet as Indians, as great-grandchildren of the great empire, English might well have been their not-so-second language. As I ate my meal, I heard three different languages in the tiny restaurant, and yet somehow the French table, the German table, and the East European table (I can’t tell the difference between Romanian and Slovakian or Albanian) managed to communicate with the wait staff, which was speaking a version of English I was hardly familiar with.
This is a fascinating thing. As the world comes indisputably closer together, our linguistic differences come into ever more tangled conversation. English might be the international language of business, law, and diplomacy today. But at those points where globalization is most focused—London, Paris, New York, Rome—it’s a mish-mosh of people struggling to order food that’s not too hot for them, or trying to explain that they have a nut allergy, or need gluten-free food. How do you say gluten-free in English that everyone in the world understands?
As of now, the lingua franca is a blessed welter of bare comprehension.