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I am guessing that more than ⅔ of the people reading this article do not consider English to be their first language. Neither do I, but still, we are communicating, and for this I think we should congratulate ourselves, because it is nothing short of a miracle.
Almost every foreigner I meet in the course of my work speaks, reads, and writes English phenomenally well and probably doesn’t give that fact any thought. I am here this week to tell you that you pulled off something extraordinary: The ability to communicate well in a language that is not the one you grew up with. And what a weird language it is, more a heap of words really, with a loosey goosey syntax, totally weird spelling, and even weirder pronunciation rules. To this day there are words that I know well but that I have only read, never heard spoken, and consequently I have no idea how to pronounce them.Name me any other language where words like fever and never do not rhyme and then try to figure out how to pronounce lever. Is it more like “leaver” or more like “deafer”. To this day I do not know.
Whereas German, French, and Spanish are a bit like C++: Lots of rules, oodles of needless syntax, and full of dangerous subtleties, English is an unruly mess, much like Perl. It’s really a miracle that any information ever gets transferred accurately when you communicate in English. I used to manage a team that contained a Canadian, an Englishman, an Australian, and an American. Let me tell you, these were four people divided by a common language. If I said that something was “an interesting idea”, there were immediately two camps in the team: The people who thought this was a great idea that we should immediately execute on and the people who thought that I had just shat on the idea.
One of the problems caused by our collective skills in English is that the native speakers often think it is much better than it really is, leading to communication problems. The ever lovely Mrs. Wednesday Wisdom for instance thinks that my English is perfect. Let me tell you friends, it is not. It is not bad (bar the Dutch accent), but there are definitely times when it is lacking. If you think my English is decent, you should hear me in Dutch, which is out of this world!
One of the reasons Mrs. Wednesday Wisdom thinks my command of her language is better than it really is, is because I regularly correct her English. “You see”, she then says: “Your English is better than mine!” “No honey”, I then tell her: “I just learned your language from actual academics, not by just parroting random people around me.”
This is of course not really true, as I learned quite a lot of English from TV shows and movies, which in Holland are broadcast in their original language with subtitles.
German native speakers are regularly surprised that I can drum up lists of prepositions that always take the dative case, always take the accusative case, or either dative or accusative depending on whether we are talking about a location or motion towards something. They don’t know these lists themselves, they just do it correctly automatically. Similarly, I know “rules” about English that no native English speaker knows for exactly the same reason: They never learned their own language properly.
Because they think that our English is better than it is, many native speakers do not always communicate with care when it comes down to writing and (especially) speaking with non-native speakers. For instance: English has a wide variety of colorful idioms from its rich history which spans centuries and the globe, and sometimes I am at a loss what English phrases mean. For instance I remember sitting in a sales meeting (a dark part of my past that I rarely talk about) and there was a lot of talk about “playing between the twenties”. I had no idea what they meant and eventually, after asking, I learned that it was a sportsball metaphor.
Additionally: In what language does “semaphore” get an “e” tucked on at the end, whereas “metaphor” does not? Cue wise asses who will explain to me that this is because the word was borrowed from Greek and retained its original spelling. Yes, maybe, but still.
Another example of me not understanding English was during my wedding planning. Mrs. Wednesday Wisdom wanted to hold a “rehearsal dinner”. I wondered why, because I already knew how to eat and thought I didn’t need to rehearse that.
My English fails in many ways, especially when things are heating up and I am getting emotional. After almost ten years of marriage to an American I can safely say that I am terrible at fighting in English. When the emotions overtake me, I become less eloquent anyway (because stress makes stupid), but especially so in my second language: I start stuttering and grasping for words. To make matters worse, I start saying really dumb things that I then have to retract and explain. It’s a mess really.
Another problem that non-native speakers have is that certain words that are considered bad in English are almost value free for us. Take the word “fuck” for instance. I have no history of being told as a small child that it is a bad word and I have never been reprimanded for using it. But what I do have is lots of exposure to cool TV shows, movies, and songs where the actors use the word liberally. And since I learned half of my English from, you got it: TV shows, movies, and songs, I have no internal barrier on dropping the F-bomb. I have learned not to do it in polite conversation, but I have zero emotions around the use of the word, whereas I would never use the Dutch equivalent unless I am among close friends or family.
A prime example of this is my Austrian friend M. He hails from Viennese high society and his German is the most polite and most refined German you can imagine. But when he speaks English, it seems as if he is rehearsing for a speaking part in a Quentin Tarantino movie.
Foreigners do their best to make it seem that it is no big deal that they speak English well and give it off that back home they all speak English fluently. The first thing is true, but the latter usually is not. That said, I once took Mrs. Wednesday Wisdom to a Dutch soccer match. We were seated next to the neighbors of my cousin and Mrs. Wednesday Wisdom was yapping away to the neighbor’s eight year old kid. After a while she said: “What I am doing, you probably don’t understand a word I am saying.” “Sure I do”, the kid said: “I speak English.”
Because we do such a terrible job explaining the limits of our mastery of English, the native speakers are rarely made aware that there really are different levels of understanding going on. Most, if not all, of us are competent enough to read, write, and speak English for our day to day business use, but it is rare to come across someone who is so good at it that they can write poetry, a great piece of fiction, or draw up a legally binding document. But, AI to the rescue: One of my friends, an Oxford educated snob, runs a school and she is happy as a clam at high tide with ChatGPT: “I love it”, she told me: “My (foreign) staff throws in their bad English and out comes good English.”
I once took her on a trip to Holland and we visited a fantastic sing-along bar with live music called “Crazy Pianos” (in The Hague; a must-visit place if you are in the mood for a good time). Approximately ⅓ of the songs played there are Dutch. After the second or third Dutch song in half an hour she said: “Wow, I did not know there were so many Dutch songs.” 🤣 She also wondered why the signs on the freeway were all in Dutch. “Well, because this is the Netherlands and this is what we speak here”, I answered.
A problem with foreigners speaking English is that they often bring their cultural habits to the language, which might not be understood by native and non-native speakers from other cultures alike. Here is an example: On one IT project we brought an expert in intercultural communication in and she listened in on a number of our phone conferences. What she pointed out is that in some cultures, the meat of the message is at the start of the sentence whereas in other cultures the meat, is placed at the end. People speaking English but from a culture which politely beats about the bush a bit are often interrupted by speakers from cultures where the important pieces of the message are at the start of the sentence. After having heard some unimportant things, these cultural barbarians think they got the gist of it already and they interrupt before the speaker gets their actual message out. This is of course not a problem of English, but the fact that everyone speaks it might give people the idea that they understand the structure of the message, whereas in reality they don’t. The fact that we all speak English, definitely does not mean we all communicate in the same way.
An advantage of many foreigners speaking English is that they also add useful things to the language. For instance, I have been led to believe that the phrase: “Kindly do the needful” hails from Indian English where it is in common use because it reflects a similar saying in one or more Indian languages. I have seen native speakers react badly to “kindly do the needful” but I think it is fantastic and I have enthusiastically adopted “needful” in my own vocabulary. In one recent playbook for instance I described opening a configuration file in vim (or emacs, I am non judgmental about you wanting to run a proto-operating system as your editor) and making the “needful edits”. Short, powerful, to the point. Needful deserves more use.
While we are on the topic of needful: Needful things is a great novel by Stephen King and a must-read before you watch the Rick and Morty episode with the same name.
English is a great language and given that we all have to work together we need to speak a common language. I don’t care whether that’s English or something else, but since, for better or for worse, it is English (much to the chagrin of the French. by the way), let’s be aware that many people speak, read, and write English phenomenally well, but not perfectly, and let’s have that awareness influence our communication.
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