“Das ist sehr interessant!”
We hadn’t even had lunch yet and I’d already heard my professor speaking 3 languages that morning. Berry Kralj, lawyer at the Council of Europe and my European Policy Seminar professor, was taking our class on a three day tour of the EU institutions in Luxembourg and Brussels.
We were at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, and he was speaking German to a British lawyer who had moments ago been explaining to us in English the finer points of how the court functions, and why the rest of the EU hates Greece right now. Professor Kralj had started off the morning conferring in French with Pierre, our bus driver (that’s right, Pierre and the purple papillon bus were back!), given us a brief introduction to the Court of Justice and our schedule there in English, talked to the security officers in French, and was now chatting with an Englishman in German.
What I was only just realizing, was that Berry Kralj wasn’t some kind of superhuman anomaly of incredibly impressive language knowledge. He was just European.
Professor Kralj and our class, outside the European Commission in Brussels. Photo courtesy of Arielle Ashley.
It was an educational trip, and I learned a lot about European government, but what really stuck with me was what I learned about the role of language in Europe. A huge percentage of the European Union staff is dedicated exclusively to language translation. In the Court of Justice, 1/3 of the staff work in some form of translation, including a large team of lawyer linguists whose sole job it is to transform verbose legalize from one language to another as accurately as possible.
Everyone who works at the EU is required to know French, as it is the official language used, but they pretty much all also know English, and most people know at least one other language too. It’s not uncommon for people to know 5 or 6 languages. According to our guide at the Court of Justice, there are a few staff members there who speak 12 or 13 languages--and that’s barely even half the languages spoken in the EU. The EU recognizes 23 official languages, and all documents must be translated into each language for the sake of transparency. The sheer amount of resources that much translation requires is astounding.
But it’s not just people who work at the EU; it seems like pretty much everyone I’ve met lately can speak at least 2, if not 3 languages very well. Even a little eight-year-old girl I helped learn to do a back handspring. Her mother is French and her father German and spoke both languages fluently, but she was apologizing to me for not being able to speak English. Standing there, communicating with her in my rough French, somehow, it seemed I should be the one apologizing.
Multilingualism is such an ingrained way of life here that people hardly even think about it. But I am constantly reminded of it. Being here in Europe, I want to reach fluency in French and Spanish now more than ever. But it’s no longer just the idea that knowing several languages would be cool or would make me special in some way. Now it feels like almost an obligation. What gives me the right to expect everyone to learn my language just because I was born in an English speaking country? I believe the more effort you put into communicating, the more you get out of it. Being around Europeans, who have so much practice at it and handle multilingual situations with total fluidity is at once both inspiring and intimidating.
It’s hard not to feel inadequate when someone who speaks upwards of 5 languages tells you they know “a little Spanish,” then starts speaking and you realize their Spanish skills are better than yours. But, despite the intimidation, as weird as this may seem, interactions like these have only made me more determined to become fluent in another language. Or two. Or maybe five. We’ll see. If I stick to it, I might get there one day. Till then, adios, au revoir, auf wiedersehen, arrivederci, sayonara, and see ya later.
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