MY FATHER always delights in relating the story of the late historian Leo Valiani, who would bamboozle (especially British) colleagues at academic conferences, with his ability to switch effortlessly between six languages.
There was nothing unusual in his multilingualism, he would explain. Born before the First World War to an Italian family in Fiume (now Rijeka in Croatia), his mother tongue was Italian; growing up in Austria-Hungary as it then was, he obviously spoke German, the language of the empire, and Hungarian, since Fiume was technically part of Hungary; of course, he also spoke Serbo-Croatian, the language of the hinterland behind the Italianate Adriatic towns, and French – well everyone of a certain class spoke French in those days; in his old age, he would add with a twinkle in his eye, he had even managed to pick up a decent smattering of English.
As Europe regrouped into nation states along the 20th century, such polyglots became museum pieces. Language was used as the tool of integration and immigrant parents were encouraged not to confuse their children by speaking a foreign tongue at home. Many – understandably – chose to bury their mother tongues, to mark a clean slate and forget the traumas that had often uprooted them from home.
Today, the universal rise of English, mirroring the post-war dominance of America, and snowballing with the dizzying speed of globalisation, would seem to make such multilingualism finally obsolete. All today’s children need to do is learn good English, and their passport to success is assured.
But is it? This was the question posed by a gathering of experts from across Europe, brought together in Paris last week under the aegis of the French presidency of the European Union. Certainly, the EU feels concerned enough about the issue to have appointed a Commissioner, Leonard Orban, specifically responsible for multilingualism, setting a target for all children across the Union to learn two languages beyond their mother tongue.
“When we all speak the same language, then we’ll have reached the Tower of Babel,” said the philosopher Michel Foucault, a kind of “desperanto” as French Culture Minister Christine Albanel described it last Friday. While facilitating superficial communication, there is a risk that the rise of a globalised Pidgin English could actually serve as an obstacle to understanding among cultures.
An example close to home: this paper regularly publishes letters from frustrated British expatriates relating Kafkaesque experiences with local bureaucracy. It’s not a problem of communication – almost every civil servant in Cyprus speaks English, often very well – and our readers, understandably, tend to cry discrimination. Yet any foreigner who has learned Greek will find that doors can open in miraculous ways.
What does this tell us? That communication is about more than just words. The expatriate speaking English in a Cypriot government office is automatically putting his interlocutor at a disadvantage, within his own space. Can we really be surprised that a wall goes up – sometimes deliberately, sometimes simply because the official does not have the linguistic skill to give a nuanced answer and retreats behind an apparently boorish monosyllabic shield? Conversely, the foreigner speaking the slightest Greek is deliberately putting himself at a disadvantage, acknowledging that the other is his host, and earning bagfuls of good will. If he speaks with any fluency, he will have gone a step further, entering under the skin of the country in which he lives to gain a degree of cultural understanding that charts his way through different social mores.
If this is true at an everyday level, how much more so in business or politics. The European Parliament may be brimming with interpreters, yet the MEP who can cut deals, not only in English, but in, say, Italian and French, is at a distinct advantage, while the multinational that includes a Polish speaker on a business trip to Warsaw will surely put itself in pole position to clinch a valuable deal. Indeed, a Swiss research team has calculated that a multilingual staff can contribute an added value of 35 per cent in the service sector, and even as much as 16 and 8 per cent respectively in the far less obvious sectors of construction and transport.
So practical considerations underline the very real need for multilingualism, but those considerations are in themselves a reflection of a new reality. Globalisation may have spread English on the coattails of MacDonald’s, but the ease of communication and travel have changed the nature of integration and identity. Even the poorest migrant now regularly speaks to his family back home and hears his own language on satellite TV. Within Europe, workers and families think nothing of travelling back and forth for work and pleasure, often settling across borders. And while English swamps the world as the new lingua franca, our individual cultural and linguistic personae become more complex, with increasing numbers again juggling linguistic identities not dissimilar to those of Mitteleuropa a century ago.
There’s nothing wrong in a single dominant language: Greek, Latin, French, English, there’s always been one reflecting the political dominance of the time – tomorrow it might be Chinese. But the EU is right to maintain the importance of linguistic diversity, and not just because of the obvious advantages cited above. In Paris last week, speaker after speaker plucked reflections on language from some of the world’s greatest minds: “Who learns a new language acquires a new soul” (Juan Ramon Jimenez); “Each language sees the world in a different way” (Federico Fellini); “The limits of my language are the limits of my world” (Ludwig Wittgenstein).
What they are all pointing to is how language can enrich us, broaden our horizons, open us not just to new forms of expression but to new ways of thinking and being. We are different people in different languages, each idiom unlocking new elements of our personalities, while each new language learnt enriches our ability to speak our own.
The danger of English is not its dominance, but its impoverishment, both among its native speakers who see no incentive to go beyond their own language, and among its global cohorts who parrot a truncated form of Microsoft English (US).
If we allow that to happen, then truly the global language will throw up more walls than bridges in an age more desperate than ever for communication, feeding into the sense of resentment of the disenfranchised and breeding a dialogue of the deaf that is not only cause for intellectual despair, but frankly dangerous in today’s fragile world.
