There were ‘minor’ delays on the District Line yet again this morning. In all, I had to wait 20 minutes for a train, and it was the 4th one that rolled past and I really only managed to squeeze in due to luck. Don’t get me started on the concept of crush capacity of trains!
Anyways, in that 20 minutes I was standing on a platform standing eerily close to both railroad tracks with the capacity to kill me and a lot of other people rather intent on getting on one of these trains to go to work. To my left was a sharply dressed Eastern European man speaking loudly on his cell phone, seemingly to his mother (he kept saying something that sounded like ‘mama’), and to my right was a couple from who knows where speaking yet another language I was unfamiliar with. Again, with all this time to think on my hands (I’m between books), I started to think about the relative prevalence levels of hearing English spoken in London and Portland/Seattle and I suppose the US in general.
In London, it seems sometimes that most conversations overheard in public are not in English. In the US, a much smaller portion of overheard conversations are in foreign languages, but for some reason this seems to cause a lot of worry amongst people. The only reason that I could think of for this is that while here we have the higher proportion of foreign conversations, they are in a very wide range of languages. In the US you primarily hear people speaking in Spanish. This thus leads to the general conclusion that the US is going to be overtaken by people speaking Spanish and no one will be able to speak English. Which I think is unlikely, but even so, not the end of the world in many respects.
That all being said, I should toss in the disclaimer that people do often complain about the lack of English-language skills amongst immigrants. It’s rather unlikely that you’ll ever have an English waiter or waitress, nor will you be ordering your coffee from a native. People generally complain that all of the builders and plumbers are Polish (Polish beer sales are threw the roof!). However, there are no apocalyptic worries about the demise of the English language in general terms!
Just something to think about, I suppose!
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I've been hearing a lot of foreign languages spoken here in P-town this summer. I'm assuming they are taking advantage of the good exchange rates (for them) and vacationing here. We do have nice summers!
I remember reading the results of a survey of EU people who said that they thought English will become their "common" language. We noticed in our travels that it was used that way. Another survey noted "When looking at the overall situation within the European Union, English remains the most widely used language, followed by German and French." So, I think English is here to stay, but we shouldn't be arrogant about it and should still learn other languages, me thinks!
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