Don’t worry, everyone speaks English
One of the biggest challenges of moving to a non-English speaking country is the necessity to learn a foreign language. For some it’s the prime reason not to move, as the challenge can seem insurmountable. This is especially true for the British, who are remarkable in Europe for their inability to speak more than their native tongue. A recent study has shown that there has been a dramatic decline in language learning and ability since the decision to remove compulsory language study from the GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) programme in 2004. Fewer than half of UK school pupils choose to take up a language, compared with 76% of pupils taking languages in 2002. The result of this shortsighted decision should come as no surprise, but even before it was made, there was hardly a great emphasis on why speaking more than one language might be useful. I graduated secondary school before the law changed and was therefore required to take at least one language during my GCSEs, but it was never explained to us why learning French or German, the only two languages on offer at my school, was useful, it was simply another subject hurdle to jump. Considering that throughout school I was constantly reminded how critical it was to have maths skills (“You won’t get anywhere without maths”), it’s odd that no one pointed out the myriad benefits of learning a second language.
Tied to this decline in language skills is the often heard phrase “Well, everyone speaks English anyway”. I heard it at school, I heard it when I told people I planned to move to Germany and I still hear it today from British people who actually live here. It’s like the sacred mantra of the British, repeated so much, that it’s somehow become gospel truth. I’ve heard and been part of discussions where British people actually discourage others from learning a language, as if someone else’s attempts to better themselves is an almighty threat. “Why bother” they whine “The Germans speak better English than we do!”.
The question is, do the Germans speak English better than native-speakers? I have some experience with this topic, given that I started my career teaching Business English. Although much of what I do today focuses on teaching communication, intercultural and organisational topics, not so long ago I was making lesson plans and creating activities, all with the aim of teaching various businesses to work in English. What I learned from those years is this: yes, the German education system prepares many young people with a technical knowledge of the English language. More than once, I found myself being challenged over the minutiae of the present perfect, or faced demands from a room full of people to go into detail on conditional sentences. English grammar rules are drilled into German school pupils, to the point that it appears to be the only focus of lessons. What the German education system fails to prepare young people for is the reality that the English learned in school is light-years away from the English spoken by the native speaker. Though things are changing, native speakers remain a law unto themselves.
Native English (like German) is a minefield of colloquialisms, idioms and weird phrasing, not to mention the complications of pronunciation and accents. Worse still, they will often internalise grammatical errors, which must confuse anyone listening who has rigidly learned the vast array of complex grammar rules. My wife’s experience is similar to many of her compatriots. She arrived in England in the halcyon days of 2007, with top marks in English and ready to start her ERASMUS year abroad. She landed at Newcastle Airport, confident in her skills and ready to take on the challenge, but that confidence was severely rocked as soon as she spoke to one of my Geordie brethren. She couldn’t understand anything anyone was saying. The English spoken in the North East of England was unlike any she had learned at school or in the first years of her English degree in Germany. She was delighted to find that Geordies were incredibly welcoming and helpful, their friendliness apparently transcending the spoken word, but she had no idea what they were on about. They spoke quickly, they kept saying “pet” even though there were no obvious animals in sight, and every sentence seemed to end in the word “like”.
Before you get the wrong idea, I’m not against the nuances of British English or American English, for that matter. They’re important cultural features that have developed over centuries, both fun and curious variations, which tell us a lot about how the world used to be in the places where these different forms are still spoken. I love my dialect and work very hard to retain my accent (when I’m not teaching) as it’s something I hope to pass on to my children as part of their mixed heritage. My wife also gets a kick out of the fact that she is regularly assumed to be a native Geordie. Although it was difficult at first, my wife has acclimatised over the many years we’ve been together. Her Geordie pronunciation of “water” is truly a thing of beauty.
Dialect and colloquialisms are one thing, but it’s not just these points that cause English learners to question their language skills. Sit through any meeting that involves a native speaker, and you see the wealth of ridiculous language that has been created to assuage the egos of native-English speaking middle managers, who use buzzwords like a bad chef uses salt. Frankly this jargon is the bane of my existence. Several times a year I will have to address the wealth of incomprehensible gibberish that has been thought up by people who surely imagine themselves to be great communicators. Meetings filled with people deep-diving, synergising or levelling up, while actively being agile, at the end of the day. The trick of a good buzzword is that it sounds like something people should know, while at the same time saying almost nothing of substance. So impenetrable is this morass of verbal nothingness, that when someone uses a string of buzzwords, those who do not understand are unlikely to say anything for fear of looking unqualified or inept. They just nod, write everything down, and then after the meeting send me an email to find out what the hell they were just told. Worse still, because the buzzwords sound like something important, German employees believe they must use them too. Which is why I often find myself unpicking phrases like eye-to-eye meeting (face-to-face meeting), a bastardisation of the term eye-to-eye (to agree).
Despite attempts to roll back reality, we truly live in a global society, and unless something truly catastrophic occurs, this is unlikely to change. English is now spoken by more non-native speakers than by native-speakers, and the latter sorely need to remember that. We are rightly protective of the English language, just as the Germans are rightly protective of their own language, but if both sides could learn one simple lesson, it is this: think about your audience. If you know you’re speaking to a non-native speaker of your language, do them a favour, think about how you phrase things. One good sentence spoken by a non-native is not an invitation to suddenly speak a mile-a-minute, it’s a chance to communicate.
Proofreader: @ScandiTina
Image Credit
Photo by Jack Foster on Unsplash
Photo by Feliphe Schiarolli on Unsplash
