Listening to languages!

As a young teenager, just getting into learning foreign languages, I was known to stay on the bus past my stop so that I could continue to eavesdrop on people speaking something foreign. Okay, maybe I was a bit geeky but I was mostly harmless.

Here’s a different view. From the Manchester Evening News, I think, the other day I got this:-

“One in four Brits are 'bothered' by hearing non-English languages in the UK Nearly a third of Brits said that disliking people speaking languages other than English in public is not racist behaviour - while nearly 60 per cent said it was .

More than a quarter of Brits are 'bothered' by hearing non-English languages when they are out in public. One in four Brits say that hearing people talk in languages other than English in the UK bothers them. A new survey has revealed that 26 per cent of Brits are bothered by hearing conversations in other languages while they are in the UK.

YouGov asked 1,461 British adults the question: "When in the UK, are you bothered when you hear those from a non-English speaking country talking to each other in their own language, or not?"

The majority of those surveyed said they were not bothered at all, while eight percent said they would be 'very bothered' and a further 18 per cent said they would be 'fairly bothered'.”

Now, my daughter and I walked through the centre of Manchester the other day,  commenting on the fact that one of the things we really love about our city is hearing so many different languages spoken in its streets. It’s really good to live in a cosmopolitan city. We are not bothered in the least by foreign languages being spoken. Quite the opposite.

Then, regarding the notice that everyone in the block of flats in-the news should speak only English, I came across this that someone posted:-

“Here’s a deal:

I’ll stop speaking Romanian with my Romanian friends, colleagues and family in the UK when every British migrant in Spain and France will also speak in Spanish and French with their British mates.”

 Quite so!