Yup, that’s pretty much the super secret social contract - you have to make the initial effort, is the point. Which is your side of the politeness, then we’re (more often than not) polite in return.
If you start off in English however, then switch to LOUUUDEEER AND SLOOOWEEER frustrated English when the first time around didn’t work, that’s when we tend to get a punctual case of the no comprende :o.
(As for myself, I’m a terrible Parisian and often get out of my way to help out tourists or volunteer my services as interpreter when needed - English, Spanish or German. I just get a kick out of y’alls relief :p)
Oh, that happens with LOUUUUUDER AND SLOOOOOOWEEER frustrated Spanish and French and Catalan too, to mention three I’ve seen (well, I expect the French part may not happen in Paris, but depending on the dialects involved maybe it does). Moving to gestures and drawings and valiantly trying to keep the smile up is a good way to get help; moving to repeating the same thing that was not understood, without any attempts at looking for a different way to say it, is not. And the best way to give everybody in the surrounding area a horrible case of sudden-onset-deafness is to scream something along the lines of “doesn’t anybody here speak [language]?”
The cases of “person speaking in one language, another person in a different one” doesn’t even require both people to know both languages: they just require them to understand the other. It can involve, as in the examples given so far, people who understand one language better than they can express themselves in it, or it can involve languages which are close enough to be mutually understandable with very small effort: Italian and about any other romance language; Spanish, Italian and cow-French (French pronounced as if it was being read by a Spanish-speaking or Italian-speaking cow)… I’ve been part of conversations where everybody was supposed to be speaking the same language but, because one of the parties was very “closed” (1), the conversation was less fluid than what you get from two Romance-language speakers who have decided they’re by Jove going to understand each other.
1: unable to rephrase and to enunciate properly, apparently also being unable to comprehend that not everybody spoke their dialect. Several of these people were such bad speakers that their own mothers or boyfriends had problems understanding them on the phone.
The Chinese script is language-agnostic. It’s not particularly Manderin or Hokkien or anything: it works just as well with English. It’s a bit harder to learn than phonetic scripts, but writing was seen as a universal: any educated person would understand and write script, regardless of language. English script was, of course, just scribble: you would assume that an educated person could write script regardless of language.
I’ve done it loads of times, with English and Swedish. Frequently I do it when I want to be absolutely sure I am saying the correct thing, like with Doctors. When I was being treated for a sleep disorder, my therapist spoke Swedish, so she could be sure that she said he right thing, and I spoke English.
Regarding flipping between the two, I will indeed do it mid sentence, usually when I am not entirely sure what a word or phrase is in Swedish. I know that the people I am speaking to will understand it. I do this a lot at work. I do, however, have one friend who just can’t handle me doing it. Because I still speak Swedish with quite a British accent it takes him a few words to trigger that I’ve switched language. Thus I don’t do it with him.
Happens at my office all the time. We have a large chunk of Mexican-Americans. Some of them speak much better Spanish than others. Most of them speak “kitchen” Spanish, as in they know the terms for subjects that might come up in a household. But sometimes their legal vocabulary is not the greatest, especially the ones who have not also had formal instruction in Spanish or who are second- or third-generation heritage speakers.
I had an officemate for a while who was in his mid-20s and came to the U.S. when he was a small child, and he was in charge of negotiating settlements for his practice group, sometimes with monolingual Spanish speakers. He had a bitch of a time coming up with the Spanish words sometimes, so I (a native English speaker who didn’t really have an immersion experience in Spanish until age 19, but had a lot more formal language instruction than he did, and a lot more legal experience) would yell the Spanish words out to him when he was on the phone and got stuck )
It’s not quite true that the various Chinese languages are identically written in characters. Those languages (i.e., so-called “dialects” like Mandarin, Cantonese, etc.) differ in some ways. Besides pronunciation (which doesn’t matter to the characters), they have slightly different grammars and words which aren’t in the other languages. These words not in the other languages now have their own characters. There are two ways to handle this. Some non-Mandarin speakers know how to change their ways of writing enough to make what they write acceptable to Mandarin speakers. Other non-Mandarin speakers just use the characters only in their own language and the grammar of their own language.
As I misremember, there was an Indonesian/Malay area where in an interesting inversion, the ruling class spoke demotic to the plebs, so as not to seem stuck up, and the plebs spoke court language to the ruling class, to demonstrate that they could.
I’m slightly surprised that no one has mentioned the Apollo-Soyez joint US-USSR space mission back a few years (well, quite a few. 1975 if I remember right) The US astronauts spoke Russian and the soviets spoke English. The idea was that that way the conversations were slow and deliberate, and less likely to be misunderstood, as e.g., the US astronauts would not be able to wander off in rapid and colloqiual english which the Soviets would miss, and vice versa.
Plus, it’s easier to understand someone mangling your native language than it is to understand someone speaking their own, which is foreign to you, no matter how slow they go.
On a variant, the Métis on the Canadian prairies developed Méchif, a Cree-French creole language that apparently was very unusual because they consistently used nouns from one language, and verbs from the other. Most Creoles are mixtures, but don’t have strict borrowing pattern like that.
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