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Rude to Speak in Another Language? | ||
Tags: Foreign Languages | Speaking | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Cultural Experiences in Foreign Languages |  | |
| lecavaleur Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4762 days ago 146 posts - 295 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish | Message 9 of 14 19 June 2012 at 6:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think it depends on the situation.
Just yesterday, I was driving from Sherbrooke to Montréal with 3 carpool passengers I had never met. Since we all left from Sherbrooke, I just assumed everyone in the car spoke French. So for like an hour, two of the passengers and I were just rattling away in French about all kinds of things, but the third passenger was very quiet. I thought "hey, maybe he's just not a talker. You get those from time to time." Finally, I ask him in French what he does in life, studies or work. His response was "Sorry, I don't speak French." My native language being English, I start to ask him where he's from, what he does, etc. Turns out he's from Iran and he's only been in QC four months. So I forgive him for the inability to speak French and all four of us chat for a while in English. But naturally, the conversation drifted back into French after a while since it was the dominant language in the car. Was this rude? I don't know. Maybe it will be something that will convince the guy the importance of learning French if he's going to stay in Québec. I was once working in Ontario for a summer, and there were a couple other French speakers working there. Sometimes, we'd chat with each other in French, but never really in a mixed group situation. But that didn't stop anyone who might be in our earshot from complaining about it. We had a lot of German-speaking co-workers who naturally spoke to each other in German all the time. Funny how no one complained about them... I chalk it up to a special prejudice these English-Canadian co-workers had specifically against French. They know that people in Quebec take speaking French seriously, so they felt I guess justified in 'defending' the primacy of English in their Ontario workplace. Of course, I meet people in Montréal all the time who have to speak English in meetings and stuff because they have one or two unilingual anglophone co-workers. I find that to be extremely unacceptable. The real question is does absolutely everybody at work or elsewhere who may be in your earshot have the inalienable right to know what you and your compatriot are talking about? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5115 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 10 of 14 19 June 2012 at 6:58pm | IP Logged | ||
Ooh! This reminds me of a situation I was in once. I was at a sports bar watching a game on one of the big screens scattered around the bar and happened to be sitting next to a deaf person. We were cheering for the same team, and eventually struck up a conversation. Because I don't know ASL, we started writing messages on bar napkins to communicate. All of the sudden 4 more deaf friends of his came into the bar to join him. They happily went about signing between each other, and I sat back and watched - fascinated. They were kind enough to scribble anything they wanted to include me in on napkins. Then they started actually trying to teach me a bit. And it got to the point where, after some signing exchanges between them, my new friend would turn to me and motion whether I could understand or guess what they were saying. Needless to say, I was pretty happy with the whole thing, but I'm a language nut, so everything was great. And I gained some new friends out of it. We still meet up occasionally to watch a game. I end up learning a little bit more each time :-) Had I not been interested in languages, I probably would have just nodded and continued cheering without any further conversation, but I somehow think that sign language would be treated differently by most monolinguals. After all, it's a much different scenario than a bilingual or multilingual with a choice of languages to speak. R. == Edited by hrhenry on 19 June 2012 at 7:31pm 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6688 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 11 of 14 20 June 2012 at 12:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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Quite generally I would not want people in a group to switch languages just to accommodate me - unless of course I needed the information. But of course there are exceptions. For instance we once had a meeting in my travel club with one guest from Australia, and during our 'tour de table' (where everybody is supposed to listen) we switched to English. But I wouldn't want to do that at all meetings so maybe it is good that most meetings are limited to our active members.
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| MarlonX19 Diglot Groupie Brazil Joined 4150 days ago 40 posts - 51 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English Studies: French | Message 12 of 14 02 July 2013 at 6:14am | IP Logged | ||
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Some people get offended when others start talking in a language they dont know.
I rememeber last year when my aunt's boyfriend who speaks enlgish, was here. We all were speaking in Portuguese but then I started talking in English to him, the thing is that everybody had gone quiet so as no one was talking I though there was not any problem. My grandparents, who dont speak English, left the room where we were, they only looked at each other, smiled and left the room. We kept talking in English though. A few minutes ago my aunt asked (actually sent us) to stop talking in English and switch to Portuguese, she was even kind of angry... It was a pity because he was the only person who I had the chance of practicing English with so far. We were only talking about his trip to Europe and his trip to the US that was going to take place this year (and took)... 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4429 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 13 of 14 28 November 2013 at 4:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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A lot of people mentioned already it depends on the situation. Some of the time you have everybody else in the
room talking in 1 language and you are the only one not understanding their language. They would tell you beforehand we're going to be talking in our language to get your approval. Some of the time you have 2 people who are able to speak the same languages or understand each other to some degree in each other's mother-tongue but intentionally speaking only in their language to make a political statement. Like a person of English descent in Quebec talking to a person of French descent in Quebec. Although both are fully bilingual, the English will only talk in his language and the French the same to make a statement Canada recognize my language as an official language and I have the right to speak it. Recently came across a few news report videos from Hong Kong. On the subway there were some unpleasant encounters between Chinese tourists from Mainland China and the native Cantonese-speakers on the subway. They bumped into each other but instead of saying sorry and be done with it the Hong Kong native would talk in Cantonese telling the Chinese tourist Hong Kong doesn't need people from the Mainland, go home sort of thing. And the tourist from China said something like without us spending money here, the Hong Kong economy would sink in Mandarin. Both sides understood each other perfectly well. Just that they avoided talking to each other in the same language to create a scene. There are other times you wanted a discussion to be private so you switch languages to keep certain people from participating. Edited by shk00design on 28 November 2013 at 4:22pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4607 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 14 of 14 03 February 2014 at 2:26am | IP Logged | ||
I don't think it was rude to drift back into French after exchanging pleasantries with the Iranian guy. If he has chosen to live in a French-speaking society then it's really in his interests to learn the language. Of course, you can't be fluent after 4 months but he has to start somewhere. As for the workplace, that can be tricky because sometimes a company will have an official corporate language. I remember my wife complaining to me that 2 of her co-workers spoke French to each other during a night shift when only the three of them were present. This in the UK with an American company whose corporate language was naturally English. Understandably she felt a bit left out. She did make the point that she had no objections to them speaking in French during coffee breaks but she objected to not being privvy to all information while on the job. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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