I’ve been thinking about multilingualism in Berlin (as an L1 English speaker living in Berlin) and the link to the assumption that you’re exposed to English (at the very least!) to the degree that it’s not even thought of as ‘bilingualism’ anymore. What I’ve found particularly interesting lately is the general outrage/embarrassment that’s surrounded the recent instatement of Guido Westerwelle as German Foreign Minister. The scandal has been that his English has been publicly judged as entirely insufficient (and in fact many people are saying he “can’t” speak English). You can hear Westerwelle’s English use here (as well as read some of the comments, in which lots of people say ‘how embarrassing’!):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSS7tEme8U0

At 1:55 he switches briefly to German (“and the- the Aufschwung ist da”) and the crowd laughs (and I don’t think they’re laughing at the content…). I went to see a popular Berlin comedian last week, Kurt Krömer, (and was pleased by how much I understood :-)!, and there was a joke about Westerwelle’s English in the show.

I can’t help compare this ‘of course he should speak highly proficient English’ to the reception of other languages spoken in a similar context in Australia. During the last federal election much fuss was made about the ability of now prime-minister Kevin Rudd’s Mandarin proficiency. In particular, the then foreign minister, Alexander Downer, claimed that Rudd was merely ‘showing off’ and that Downer himself also spoke French, but didn’t feel he had to flaunt it. [You can hear Downer speaking French at the beginning of this interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RduckEDWj3c%5D

You can hear Downer talking about languages and Rudd during an interview on Radio National in 2007, just prior to the election (start at 4:28):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2BcLgfldNY

My favourite snippet in the above clip is: “though there are thousands upon thousands of Australians, there are tens of thousands of Australians who can speak foreign languages…”. I wonder if that does or doesn’t include the over 4 million people in Australia who reported speaking a language other than English in the home in the 2007 national census? [There are also some further wonderful comments in this article: http://www.theage.com.au/news/National/Downer-takes-swipe-at-Rudds-Mandarin/2007/09/07/1188783483181.html, where Downer plays one-upmanship by noting that he learnt French in two months, while it took Rudd two years!]

What would a Sociolinguist 2.0 do (WWS2D?) in studying these public attitudes? How do they fit into the paradigm shift? Maybe a discussion would fit nicely into a chapter on monolingualism in a Sociolinguistics textbook? ☺

Thanks so much for your enlivening blog posts!