Multilingualism is the shit

How many languages can you speak? I can speak two apart from this one, though pretty shitly. My Arabic is generally comprised of swear words and basic vocab, learnt at school, like colours and numbers, or stuff I picked up while living in the Middle East, like how to order a plate of falafel, easy on the oil. The rest is an amalgamation of ‘Facebook Arabic’ – conversational or slang – and heavier words, ingrained into my memory as a result of a well-intentioned, but ultimately failed attempt to read the Quran when I was 17. Then there’s my French, which is really an Algerian patois I was forced to adopt during the few summers I spent in Oran as a kid. I like to big-up my language skills, pretending I’m much better at either of these two than I really am, because in the UK, the idea of bilingualism is pretty impressive.

Kids at my high school found it pretty cool, me being able to speak something that wasn’t straight-up BBC English, so I learnt to play around with them a little. In Year 11, I taught my Spanish teacher to say ‘kol khara’, promising her that the phrase would go down well when she went to Egypt for her summer holiday; and in Year 9, I fluked an entire module of my GCSE in Expressive Arts by pretending to be an Arab delegate at the UN in a play about climate change. I didn’t have to learn a script, and since no one else could understand Arabic, basically repeated the words of a Mahmoud Darwish poem 13 times until my monologue was up. (I still love that poem now – “'An al-Insan”, it’s called.)

I used to waste away my high school-era weekends in an area of the local city centre famed for its multiculturalism. Here, I convinced quite a few second-generation Pakistanis and Arabs to be my friends (idiots), and was duly impressed when I found out they could ACTUALLY speak another tongue. It was pretty embarrassing, cocking up my tenses while they could do cool shit like be ironic in Urdu or sing some Marcel Khalife and actually get what the guy was saying. It was then that I realised that the fascination my claim to multilingualism provoked in the UK wasn’t just a result of the rampant cultural-deficiency that my teeny tiny village-based school suffered from, but a pretty reasonable thing. To speak another language well enough, to the level that you can express your most random of thoughts in it, is fucking cool. Only speaking one language, in my opinion, seriously stunts your ability to communicate, to give a voice to that little part of you that no speaka de English. If you are one of those cringe-inducing individuals who believe that everyone in this world should learn English, just so that you don’t have to make a special effort on holiday, take heed from the fact that even George Dubya can speak something other than Texan Drawl (I honestly doubted he understood English for the majority of his presidency).

Currently, the linguistic makeup of every major English-speaking nation on Earth is undergoing a monumental shift, with 1-in-4 Americans being fluent in another language (more than half of whom are Spanish-speakers), compared to the tragic 62% of Britons who can’t even speak another language at the most basic level.

Trying to do my bit to combat this ignoramia epidemic, I am currently attempting to bring my Arabic up to an intelligible level by conversing with the Lebanese guy who makes my shawarmas every Friday, and am also working on fashioning something out of my French, but I think I’ll wait until the results of their presidential election before progressing any further on that one.