In national political elections, speaking foreign languages is not as important as other qualities. Even people who are chosen as foreign ministers it’s not their language proficiency as much as general ease and manners in other cultures. For all high-profile meetings where lots of things are at stake, both politics and business will use translators to make sure all details are correct. Many people (it’s often said to be typical German but anecdotally it seems to apply to most people learning a foreign language) who speak another language well enough to communicate will still feel hesitant because they don’t speak it perfect and therefore prefer translators.
So it depends on how serious the situation/ transaction is, and how relaxed/ informal the relationship between the politicans in question is.
I mentioned this to someone in my office who said that if Merkel understands French and Sarkozy understands German, perhaps they each speak in their own native language. There’s no reason why they have to converse in the same language as long as they are understood.
From my own experience with languages, if not corridors of power, I have frequently done this. E.g., he speaks better French than English, and is worried or embarrassed of speaking unclearly or haltingly; I understand French fluently, but cannot get the damn words out of my mouth.
Watzlawick mentioned this in one of his books on reality and communication about how this method was decided for the first international space project: Russian-speaking cosmonauts and English-speaking astronauts had to work together in a joined project, so what language should be spoken? Choosing one language of the two would have been not only a political problem, but also carried the problem of errors in understanding, a big problem in such difficult matter like rocket science. So the experts decided: The Russians will speak English, the Americans will speak Russian. By speaking in a foreign language, you don’t yabber at high speed, you pick your words slowly, and the other side knows to query back what the word you just used means. Speaking too quickly in your own language runs the risk of the other side nodding yes while understanding something else entirely.
This is what the American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts, serving together aboard a Soviet spacecraft in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010: Odyssey Two, decide to do.
BTW, Queen Elizabeth II is fluent in both English and French, and needs no translator when speaking to French VIPs and visitors.
Some politicians don’t even need to speak English well enough on the international stage: Oettingerembarrassing himself. (Given that he’s a commissioner for the EU, he should be able to speak at least one foreign language adequately.)
(This is the subtitled version, but not all subtitles are correct; several words he obviously meant another word, though with his … peculiar pronunciation it’s not always easy to tell.)
concerning the prevalence of monolingual Europeans: my daughter is in a regular French public high school in France, and to graduate (pass the bac ES ) she needs two (2!) foreign languages.
Is this supposed to be unusual or noteworthy? It’s called a curriculum, where children going to public schools need to learn a minimum of agreed-upon subjects to pass and graduate. Children need also to know math, physics/chem./biology, history, music/art… Curriculums differ between countries, and sometimes between states, but two foreign languages is generally the minimum. E.g. in Germany, the advanced High School (graduating certifies you for attending university), has groups of subjects, and from each group some subjects must be passed in order to graduate. So at my math-natural science oriented High School, we had two foreign languages (English and a choice between Latin and French), while at the neigbhoring language-oriented High School, pupils had either old languages (Old Greek, Latin and English) or modern languages (Latin, English, French) in order to graduate.
From my high school memories (and my current level in Spanish, a language I’ve learned for five years to end up speaking it like a five years old), the foreign languages level of the French educational system is piss poor, to be charitable.
I think I have written it in another thread, but my mom used to be an English teacher in college and lycée. When I crashed at my parents’home and there were some student homeworks or tests awaiting to be corrected, I would make a point of leafing through them, just for laughs. Some of the shit in it was unbelievable for people about to leave high school and enter university.
Back to the OP: I am surprised to hear that Sarkozy speaks German, even more so fluently. How do we know that?
Not every pupil of the lycee graduates, and not everybody graduates with good marks, you do know that? In a class of 20 or 30 pupils, there will always be a few tests of low quality. Now, if 17 out of 20 tests were horrible, you’d have reason to complain.
And of course, the aim is not be able to speak/write at native level, because that would be hard to reach in 4-5 years of High School.
It was a case of “17 out of 20 tests” being extremely mediocre. The level of English they possessed at eighteen was lower than what my level was at eleven years old…
There’s definitely a problem in language teaching in the French system.
I was blessed with having an incredible teacher in my very first year, who managed to make the whole class fluent in English in just one year. I know I was lucky, but I still can’t understand the level of apathy from other students during English classes when I was in lycée.
Depends how you define “monolingual” and “bilingual”.
French kids have to select at least two foreign languages to learn in school as early as 11-12, and by the time they pass their final exam at age 18 they’re *supposed *to be comfortable in at least the first one… But the target isn’t reached by every kid, comfortable is somewhat far from fluent still ; and of course unless they keep using it or at least hearing it in their daily life after they’ve graduated they’ll lose much over time.
I know I forgot most of my German, even though I was pretty good at it back then - I think I could still get by if you dumped me in Munich, sort of, but negotiating European policy ? Not as such, no
