Comment by johnisgood

13 hours ago

Is it reasonable to say that in many (not all) parts of London, English no longer functions reliably as the default public language, even if most individuals technically "speak English"?

18 comments

johnisgood

Reply
pjc50  12 hours ago

Across most of the world, people who do not share a common native language will speak English to each other. London is no different.

What this is, is a racist meme pretending that the significant fraction of immigrants to London who may occasionally speak their native language to each other in public is somehow a problem. Exactly equivalent to Americans panicking about Spanish.

  • johnisgood  12 hours ago

    I think the "Exactly equivalent to Americans panicking about Spanish" comparison is good. Thanks!

    • pjc50  12 hours ago

      I was going to add "coming into a pub in Wales and complaining about the occupants switching to Welsh", but that is a slightly different scenario. Partly because Welsh is much rarer.

Joeboy  11 hours ago

Your comment reminded of the youtuber who changed the shop signs in his video into scary non-English script: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPZxMVpnCBM

Edit: Changed to link I like a bit more

  • direwolf20  9 hours ago

    There are shops elsewhere in Europe with Arabic signs. You can go there and buy things. They're not outside of the ordinary statistical distribution of shops.

    Certain people would rather fearmonger though.

dukeyukey  12 hours ago

I don't think so. Like sure, if you're a Bangladeshi living in Tower Hamlets you could probably get away with a limited life speaking only Bengali, but you could say the same about Spanish in swathes of the US. Realistically, you need English.

  • ctrlmeta  12 hours ago

    I have done a lot of social work with Bangladeshi community. What many people don't know that the Bangladeshi wives who come as dependants speak better English than their husbands and sometimes as good as the natives.

    I was surprised the first time I got into volunteer work. Figured that these wives have never spoken English in their home country. So when they moved to London, they learnt English from scratch and picked up the local accent and speaking style. Their grammar may not be perfect sometimes but whose is?

ctrlmeta  12 hours ago

> English no longer functions reliably as the default public language

Absolutely false. My god! Have you even been to London? Stop consuming propaganda from Twitter/X and Facebook. It isn't good for your mental health.

  • johnisgood  10 hours ago

    Yes, as I have said, over 10 years.

    I do not use Twitter nor Facebook. I watch YouTube videos. These YouTubers have >1M subscribers.

    • ctrlmeta  9 hours ago

      I don't know what >1M subscribers have got to do anything. It is the case that many YouTubers pushing a specific propaganda have >1M subscribers. YouTube may be a little better than Twitter or Facebook but if you land upon any propaganda, the algorithm will loop you in and keep supplying more and more propaganda videos. 1M subscribers or 1000 subscribers doesn't matter once you are stuck in the loop.

      I see you have not been around in London for over 10 years. How was it back when you were in London? I've been in London for 10 years, so I probably came when you left. Never once I have been in any part of London where English was not the lingua franca. Yes, people speak their native languages too among themselves but I haven't met anyone anywhere in my 10 years who couldn't speak English. I don't think this is any different from any other megacity of the world.