Excusez-Moi! Speakez-Vous Franglais?

By Pico Iyer

The best way to deal with a foreigner, any old-school Brit will tell you, is to shout at the blighter in English until he catches on. If he professes not to understand, just turn up the volume till he does. A man who doesn't speak English is a man who isn't worth speaking to. Robert Byron, the great traveler of the '30s who wrote so feelingly on Islamic culture, got great comic effect by treating every alien he met -- even an American -- as an unintelligible buffoon; and his John Bullish contemporary Evelyn Waugh all but enunciated a Blimp's Code by asserting that no man who knew more than one language could express himself memorably in any. (Take that, Nabokov! Et tu, Samuel Beckett!)

To speak or not to speak: it is a question at least as old as moody Danes delivering English couplets. And every year, as summer approaches, we face the same dilemma: whether to try, when in Rome, to speak as the Romans do or to rely on Italian cabbies speaking English (with brio, no doubt, and sprezzatura). In some respects, it comes down to a question of whether 'tis better to give or to receive linguistic torture. The treachery of the phrase book, as every neophyte soon discovers, is that you cannot begin to follow the answer to the question you've pronounced so beautifully -- and, worse still, your auditor now assumes you're fluent in Swahili. Yet sticking to English, it's easy to feel that you've never left home at all (and are guilty, to boot, of a Waugh-like linguistic imperialism).

In recent years, of course, the spreading of the global village has made cross-purposing a little easier. We think it only natural to ask for hors d'oeuvres from a maitre d' -- as natural, perhaps, as discussing Realpolitik and the Zeitgeist with a Hamburger. And as English has become a kind of lingua franca, all of us are fluent in Franglais and in Japlish. It really is possible for an un-self-made man, arriving in Paris, to ask a mademoiselle for a rendezvous and then take her for le fast food and le dancing and even, perhaps, le parking. But later she may call him un jerk, and he may get upset if he doesn't know that the term, in French, means an expert dancer.

The problems are most acute, in fact, when both parties think they're speaking the same language: Shaw's famous crack about England and America being "two countries separated by the same language" is 30 times as true now that up to 60 countries claim English as their mother -- or at least stepmother -- tongue. An Australian will invite you to a hotel, and you may be shocked if you don't know that it's what you think of as a bar. An Indian will "prepone" a meeting, and only if you're quick enough to calculate "postpone" in reverse have you any chance of showing up on time. Above all, as English has become a kind of prized commodity -- and a status symbol -- in many corners of the world, those of us born in possession of it are apt to feel as vulnerable as a bejeweled dowager in a dark back alleyway. There's always someone waiting to jump out and mug us with his English -- before we can try out our Bahasa Indonesia on him.

And yet, and yet, there is to all this another dimension. For in speaking a foreign language, we tend to lose years, as well as other kinds of time, to become gentler, more innocent, more courteous versions of ourselves. We find ourselves reduced to basic adjectives, like "happy" and "sad," and erring on the side of including our "monsieurs," and we are obliged to grow resourceful and imaginative in conveying our most complex needs and feelings in the few terms we remember (like a child rebuilding Chartres out of Lego blocks). Think of how English sounds as spoken by Marcello Mastroianni: romantic, suggestive, helplessly endearing. Might the same not be true in reverse? Peter Falk appearing in a German movie (Wings of Desire) seems almost as exotic as Isabelle Adjani in an American one.

Speaking a foreign language, we cannot so easily speak our minds, but we do willy-nilly speak our hearts. We grow more direct in another tongue and say the things we would not say at home -- as if, you might say, we were under a foreign influence. Inhibitions are the first thing to get lost in translation: "Je t'aime" comes much more easily than "I love you." Small wonder, perhaps, that spies are gifted linguists by nature as well as by training (John le Carre was one of the most brilliant language students of his day); entering another tongue, we steal into another self.

; And even when we're not speaking Spanish but only English that a Spaniard will understand, the effect is just as rejuvenating. How vivid the cliche "over the hill" sounds when we're explaining it to an Osaka businessman! How rich the idiom "raining cats and dogs!" Speaking English as a second language, we find ourselves rethinking ourselves, simplifying ourselves, committed, for once, not to making impressive sentences but just to making sense. English is the official language of the European Free Trade Association, though none of its six members has English as its mother tongue. Why? Well, says the secretary-general disarmingly, "using English means we don't talk too much, since none of us knows the nuances."

Besides, whether we inflict our French on the concierge or not, many of our transactions will come down, in the end, to an antic game of charades. English may be the universal language, but it's still less universal than hands and eyes. So even as we become unwitting James Joyces -- coining neologisms by the minute -- when we essay a foreign language, we also become Marcel Marceaus: asking the way to the rest room with our eyebrows or sending back the squid with a paroxysm of mock pain. Ask a man in Tierra del Fuego to point you to The Sound of Music, and he'll instantly reply, "No problem!" (which, in every language, means that your problems are just beginning). Then he'll direct you to the Julie Andrews musical that the Argentines call The Rebel Nun. And when you say "Thank you" to him -- in Spanish -- it can almost sound like a kind of grace.