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Comment by wilfra | Hacker News Reader

Why are French people always unwilling to speak English?

The video is in France, with a French citizen, why should they?

Lets go to the SFMoMA and tell the staff to go on camera and speak in Italian because [insert unsubstantiated claim].

For the same reason everybody who wasn't French in that video used English - it's the international language of business. Also because most educated French people can speak it just fine, they just refuse to.

Many French people I've met are very unconfident about their spoken English, so prefer to avoid it if possible. Reading and writing is fine, but they worry that nobody will be able to understand their speech, or that they'll make an embarrassing gaffe.

Indeed. We are very aware of our flaws and almost ashamed of our french accent. Some know it may be an asset elsewhere (especially cause some people find it charming), but the whole rest prefer to avoid it.

I don't think it's intentionally targeted at the English, kind of like a revenge for some Napoleonian shenanigan or whatever. Just damn aware that we speak badly.

They are usually right, unfortunately

And their accent still shows (like a sore thumb) even when their English is good. Same for English speaking people speaking French.

(Except Canadians, I think their French accent is a kind of 'impedance matching')

I think I saw a couple of French people with very good English and almost no accent though.

This is not about business, this is about introducing a bank note to the citizens of the Eurozone, of which 65 million are French.

The EU has linguistic rights and to say "they refuse to" speak English is taking away their rights and protection.

Maybe they still have hope of French taking this role back. Though personally I'd bet on German before French.

> No English speaking country is in the Euro

Except Ireland.

Indeed, my bad. Edited

Ireland and Malta use the euro.

I think the video is in Frankfurt. Last time I checked, it was on Germany. ;-)

The Louvre Museum in Frankfurt? Are you serious?

It's not the Louvre, it's the Frankfurt Archaeological Museum http://www.ecb.int/euro/banknotes/europa/html/index.en.html

Please watch the video. The reference to "French" in this thread refers to Anne Coulié, Curator of Greek ceramics of the Musée du Louvre, 41 seconds into the video.

I think it pisses them off that english is now the lingua franca.

yeah, they are certainly pissed they can talk in their native tongue when they're on vacation in one of their many post-colonies where there is sun all year long, and you feel like an idiot because nobody speaks english.

when you say 'lingua franca' you should follow it with 'of the....'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lingua_francas#French

As a French, living in Germany after a couple of years in Denmark and in the US, I really enjoy diversity of languages to express opinions and ideas. English, as spoken and understood by most of the people is a very limited language, it is way better in such cases to speak your native language and let a professional with a deep understanding of both languages translate.

It is wonderful the diversity of languages, each one can express different ideas and concepts differently. Some words are so "exact" in a given language that you cannot even build a sentence to fully translate them in let say English (or French for that matter).

This is exactly why you also have many computer languages, because each one has strengths and weaknesses. Imagine someone coming and telling you that you should not write your software in Ruby but in PHP because everybody is using PHP at the moment. What do you get? The "trolls" about one language is better than the other and this at nauseam.

So, this is not because one does not understand French that one should require a French to speak another language you understand. And this goes for every languages on Earth.

If you are only speaking English, it is maybe time you start learning a foreign language and start to live in a non English speaking country, this will open your mind even more than learning yet another programming language.

Edit: Forgot to congratulate you about your joke which was the first reason I wanted to answer, but I drifted :)

Languages are about communication. Some languages do indeed lack words for certain concepts, but English is not shy about taking what it needs; if there really is some useful concept that you cannot express in English, you can use the foreign word and it will become part of the language.

I lost all shyness about using English for everything when I met a couple of Lithuanians on a train in Slovenia. If there's anyone you'd expect to be proud of their language (after decades of the soviets trying to stamp it out) it's Lithuania. The one thing they complained about to me throughout the journey? All these Slovenians who wouldn't speak English.

Maybe the point of the video is to illustrate Europe's diversity. I personally very much like that a person can express on their own language if subtitles are provided.

Why do people that speak some flavour of English feel frightened by other languages?

I suspect the underlying cause is a combination of arrogance/entitlement and fear that English is on its way to become the next Latin.

Arrogance and entitlement perhaps, however I'd argue that both are deserved. It's the international standard, it's not as if we are arrogantly feeling entitled to everybody speaking farsi or something.

However fear that english is on it's way to becoming the next latin? Whaaaat? I can't recall a thought like that ever coming to my mind nor ever reading somebody saying that and now that I've taken it in, I can't think of a single reason why somebody would fear that. If anything, the rest of the World should start fearing all of their languages are going the way of latin...

English probably is on its way to becoming the next Latin. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Latin remained the primary language across much of Medieval Europe. Over the long term, two things happened: its local use in various European districts drifted into separate languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, etc.), while the formal language ossified and died out.

That was a much different World where people only communicated with those who lived in their town. International travel and the internet have both made English much, much stronger and more important.

Did you mean the next esperanto? I don't think anybody thinks that English is going to be the next Latin, thanks to the internet, which is good though. A common language is useful for international relations. I usually call English a flapjack language because it was made from many others mashed up (quite badly sometimes). But the next Latin?

Because we are utterly bad at it. Aside the (deserved) reputation to be prompt to go on strike, the (unfair) reputation that we don't take bath on a daily basis, we also have the reputation to suck at speaking foreign languages. (I'm sure you can tell I'm French.)

The only way I knew you were French is that you're saying 'we'. Your English is fine. As is the English of nearly every French person who I've coaxed into speaking it with me.

I had to visit a hospital in France and even my doctor refused to speak English! I know she was fluent or close to it because she would nod yes or no when I asked complicated questions with big words, but she wouldn't utter a single word.

Why this is, I don't understand, but lack of skill is not the problem. You're all taught English in school, right?

But understanding a language, even understanding complicated sentences is very different from speaking it.

You have hit a sensible chord: yes we are taught English in school, oftentimes starting very young.

However, our children are also very good at pointing fingers at others: should one make a little mistake or have a decidedly french-sounding accent, she is instantly laughed at and pointed at. We learn very quick to be embarrassed and seldom use spoken English as a result.

Here's a "trick" when dealing with speakers that lack confidence in your preferred language: Try to speak their own language. Badly.

I have French people falling over themselves to speak English to me after trying to speak French to them.

It works elsewhere too. It often only takes a few halting words to get someone to accept that their own language skills are just as good or better, and want to meet you halfway, or switch fully to English.

No matter the reason, mixing different languages to name stuff in code and write comments in is bad practice in my opinion... Looking at the site's source they seem to be using both English and French. :/

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