Is talking in a foreign language rude at work?

In My Humble Opinion
61

In these matters in general; I’m one of those who are so made that others conversing in my presence in a language I don’t know, doesn’t bother me. They probably aren’t talking nastily about me; even if they are, it isn’t the end of the world.

That said, I find the above-quoted interesting. I am English; live in England, but quite often visit Wales. At the present day, the Welsh language is in relatively better health than any of the other Celtic tongues; there are some 500,000 people in Wales for whom Welsh is a birth-speech, which they use by preference to converse with other Welsh-speakers.

There has always been a degree of resentment and dislike in Wales, between Welsh and English people (nowadays mostly at a fairly low level); for a long time, in parallel with Welsh-speakers switching to English in order to be polite in “mixed company”, the exact opposite practice often happened, and happens: Welsh being spoken in the presence of English folk (residents or holidaymakers), so that things could be said which the “interlopers” would maybe not want to hear – and to some extent, deliberately to exclude them. This frequently takes place today, in strongly Welsh-speaking parts of the country. It infuriates some English “victims” of it. My own sentiment is: I can live with being non-understandably badmouthed to my face, now and again, if the continuing use of the beautiful Welsh language is promoted thereby.

62

Nope, I can’t figure out how it would be rude to have regular conversations in a foreign language at work. I have been on the both sides of the matter as a foreigner and at my home country working with foreigners. I always draw the line at mentioning another person by their name - that might come across as rude if that person doesn’t understand the language. But I also always would switch to the common language if other people come by and want to participate in the conversation even if it means changing topics on the go.

Also I really loved working with people that did not speak English well and used to chat in Turkish whenever they got a chance - I was able to learn some that way just by listening to them go about their families and stuff. Now I can surprise Turkish speakers by greeting them and asking them about their day in their language. They never expect it :slight_smile:

63

I don’t have a problem if people at work speak a foreign language on the phone or to each other during break or lunch. They need to relax However they are using it as co-overt excuses to make nasty remarks about their co-workers or clients, they should be disciplined or terminated (if it is on going problem) as soon as possible.

During company time or being on the clock, you need to speak the language that your employers requires to use. If English is the agreed language of the workplace then you need to speak English when doing work with co-workers. If you are dealing with Spanish speaking customers/clients and your boss requires you speak Spanish as part of your job requirements, then you speak Spanish. If you refuse to do, then your employer has the right to can you.

I worked with one person that had problems with Spanish speaking co-workers. I should describe this person as headstrong, argumative, and kind of a “red neck”. This person was frustrated that he or she was not able to speak with other people in the lunchroom or make friends in the workplace. Out of his/her anger, he/she told my supervisor about it. He/she said that he/she thought that speakers were talking smack in front of him/her. He/her claimed that he/her ever heard anyone mentioned his name, he would confront them.

The problem is we (the supervisor, co-workers on my crew, and I) have no way of confirming if his worries were true or not (and be give a legal excuse to finally shut him/her about the issue :smiley: :rolleyes:) because we didn’t know Spanish. Also if I were speaking Spanish and taking crap about other, I would not used his/her English or Spanish name to give any indication we were talking about him/her. I told that person if he/she thought people were being disrespected towards him/her, they should report it to HR. Also I mentioned an newspaper article mentioned that they have the legal right to speak whatever language they want during their break and there was nothing they could do about it as long as they were not crap about him. Being headstrong, he/she refused to take my advice :rolleyes:.

There is an artice about English only in the workplace. This is not the article I read or refer him/her to, but still give a general idea about the legal issues around this concept.
http://news.smeal.psu.edu/news-release-archives/2003/mar03/english.html

64

I don’t have a problem if people at work speak a foreign language on the phone or to each other during break or lunch. They need to relax However they are using it as co-overt excuses to make nasty remarks about their co-workers or clients, they should be disciplined or terminated (if it is on going problem) as soon as possible.

During company time or being on the clock, you need to speak the language that your employers requires to use. If English is the agreed language of the workplace then you need to speak English when doing work with co-workers. If you are dealing with Spanish speaking customers/clients and your boss requires you speak Spanish as part of your job requirements, then you speak Spanish. If you refuse to do, then your employer has the right to can you.

I worked with one person that had problems with Spanish speaking co-workers. I should describe this person as headstrong, argumative, and kind of a “red neck”. This person was frustrated that he or she was not able to speak with other people in the lunchroom or make friends in the workplace. Out of his/her anger, he/she told my supervisor about it. He/she said that he/she thought that speakers were talking smack in front of him/her. He/her claimed that he/her ever heard anyone mentioned his name, he would confront them.

The problem is we (the supervisor, co-workers on my crew, and I) have no way of confirming if his worries were true or not (and be give a legal excuse to finally shut him/her about the issue :smiley: :rolleyes:) because we didn’t know Spanish. Also if I were speaking Spanish and taking crap about other, I would not used his/her English or Spanish name to give any indication we were talking about him/her. I told that person if he/she thought people were being disrespected towards him/her, they should report it to HR. Also I mentioned an newspaper article mentioned that they have the legal right to speak whatever language they want during their break and there was nothing they could do about it as long as they were not crap about him. Being headstrong, he/she refused to take my advice :rolleyes:.

There is an artice about English only in the workplace. This is not the article I read or refer him/her to, but still give a general idea about the legal issues around this concept.
http://news.smeal.psu.edu/news-release-archives/2003/mar03/english.html

65

FWIW, it happens every day at my place of work. I work as a patent examiner for the European Patent Office, and the employees here come from 42 different countries.

The office has 3 “official languages” (English, French and German); everybody who works here is supposed to be fluent in at least 2 of them and have a working knowledge of the other. Work conversation will be in one of those languages. But when people of the same nationality get together, they will use their native language.

Just walking through the office you will be hearing conversations in 10, 15 different languages in a single day, easy.

If we worried about that, it would make work rather stressful and perhaps even impossible :wink: So we don’t.

66

Is speaking a foreign language at work rude?

It can be rude, but it depends on the situation. I live and work in Japan, and my native language is English. Everyone in Japan studies English in middle and high school, so theoretically they should understand English. In practice, only a handful of people understand even simple sentences spoken slowly, much less full-speed slangy English.

I speak Japanese most of the time I’m at work, unless someone wants to use English when speaking to me. I don’t work with any other English speakers, but if I did we would probably use Japanese most of the time. I can easily see chit-chat and other minutia defaulting to English if I did have an English-speaking co-worker. Anything work related, or that included someone else in the office would go back to Japanese.

I’d never talk shit right in front of someone in English, even if I thought they wouldn’t understand. You’ve either got to be a total self-centered douchebag to do something like that, or have big swinging brass balls and not give a flying fuck what someone thinks about you. Even if you don’t get “caught,” it shows callous mean spirit toward everyone else around you.

At informal occasions the way it usually works out is: if we’re with the main group, everyone uses primarily or exclusively Japanese; if we split off into a majority English-speaker group, we use English with asides in Japanese for the benefit of the one or two people who aren’t fully fluent and decide to stick with that group.

I’ve also had a few occasions where we were all using a non-primary language to communicate, like with my wife’s Flamenco group — which obviously has some native Spanish speakers — or with a group of Chinese. Usually, we’ll use Japanese even among a group that doesn’t include Japanese people since it may be the best common language (I understand Spanish pretty well, but it’s been 15–20 years since I spoke it, so everything comes out garbled Japspanglish if I try to reply). I have had situations where the native Chinese speakers wanted to use English with me even though our mutual Japanese level was possibly higher than their English level. I figure they either wanted to practice, or thought I might be more comfortable in English and they didn’t mind.

Really, language choice depends on the group dynamics. Most people try to accommodate the intended audience. If people are choosing a language you don’t understand in order to exclude you, it’s because they’re shitty people who would exclude you even if they were speaking your language. Forcing them to “include” you by making them speak your language isn’t going to change their personalities.

If they were talking about you or insulting you in their language, the only difference might be that they have to confine their backbiting to times when they aren’t right there with you, just like the rest of your co-workers. What? You do know that ALL your co-workers insult you behind your back, not just the Filipinas, right?

67

My situation is similar to this. I’m in the UK working for a multi-national enterprise software company. In Technical Support the three official languages are English French and German. The engineers speak to the customers in their native languages, and casual chatter between engineers is usually in their native language, but internal technical discussions are in English so everyone is included. I’m an English-only speaker. After being exposed to French & German every work day for 12 years you’d think I’d pick up some of it but it’s still mostly ‘blah blah blah’ to me.

68

I’m in agreement with your mother in that her coworkers should at least make an effort to speak English when she’s around. Most jobs are made more comfortable by chit-chatting with the people around you. All her colleagues - not just one or two, but all - are chatting in a language that she doesn’t know, as if she weren’t there. You’d quickly start to feel lonely in a workplace where everyone was chatting to each other and you couldn’t join in.

“Learn Tagalog” is a ridiculous suggestion. It’d take years to get to conversational fluency.

Your mother-in-law is wrong, however, assuming I’ve read it right. The manager wants only English spoken, but only when he’s in earshot. More than fair. He should know what’s going on with his employees, as far as possible, in order to know who’s getting on well with who, etc.

69

Same situation. The company is Chinese-owned, which puts both women and English in the minority category.

I have noticed that Caucasians stay with same and the Chinese, most of whom are immigrants or on work permits from Taiwan stay within their peer groups.

Perfectly understandable. It’s their world. I’m just working in it.

70

I think it’s only rude if you are in the same room or working on the same thing.

For example, if you are in the break room for lunch, you should speak the language of the office if there is anyone there who does not speak your language. The whole point of the break room is to socialize with your colleagues. If you don’t want to socialize, eat at your desk.

If you are in a meeting, speak the language of the office. If you need to have a side conversation in your mother tongue to clarify something, go ahead but make sure you explain the conversation to the rest of the group once you’ve cleared it up.

If you want to speak in a different language while chatting or working with others who speak that language, go nuts. Chances are, it will make things more efficient.

71

Ff you are so lonely in the workplace, maybe you need to think about what you offer as a conversationalist, rather than just passively expecting everyone to structure their social life around what makes you most comfortable. Are you starting conversations? Are you inviting people to lunch with you? Are you figuring out what your topics of mutual interest are? Are you building up regular conversational routines with your coworkers? Or are you sitting around pissed off that you can’t eavesdrop into conversations you are adding nothing to?

If you work to build that social foundation, it will eventually develop. But you have to take initiative and put yourself out there.

In the case of the OP, the emphasis was not on conversation, but on paranoia that all the foreigners are talking smack about you. It certainly doesn’t take “years” to get to the level where you catch that people are talking about what they are cooking for dinner tonight, and not gleefully insulting you in front of your face. And in some cases, we are talking about things like people in Arizona complaining about Spanish speakers. If you live in Arizona and can’t be bothered to learn Spanish, it’s nobody’s fault but your own when you are left out.

72

Eavesdropping is rude. And if you’re not eavesdropping you have no way of knowing what language people are speaking.

The last office job I had, everyone spoke English to some degree, the owner and early hires spoke Russian. The Russophones mostly spoke Russian to each other, switching to English when I or one of the other English speakers needed to know what was being said. I wanted (and want) to learn Russian for other reasons, but it never bothered me.

73

I also think people who demand ‘‘English-only’’ coworkers really have no concept of how difficult and exhausting it can be to try to get by in a second language. It is constant work and after a while your brian actually gets too tired to keep going (at least, that was my experience in Mexico.) Chances are those coworkers have been constantly inundated with their 2nd language, their brains are tired, and they just want to communicate painlessly. Expecting them to speak only their 2nd language through an entire 8 hour shift, especially when there are others who speak their native language, is just unrealistic.

74

Yeah, I’ll second that. After one of our frequent meetings where I’ve been concentrating intensely in Japanese for 2–3 hours (why, no, the stereotype of Japanese loving meetings is entirely unfounded) I’ll usually have a headache and feel like I did a moderately tough workout. Normal work doesn’t hit me the same way, since I don’t need to be using Japanese all the time, have more frequent mental down-time, and I don’t normally need to speak to anyone for more than a few minutes.

75

For a number of years I worked for a translation company. We had, IIRC, 15 different languages spoken in our office, usually in clumps of two or three people. I was one of only three native-english speakers in the office, and the only monolingual person in the building. 90% of the cube-farm chatter was in foreign languages.

It wasn’t until I got a job someplace full of English speakers that I realized what a blessing that had been. Hearing mumbled/vague snippets of conversations I can partly understand (or worse, overloud discussions of people’s personal/medical/sexual business in the break room) is really distracting. At least at my last job, the two ladies behind me to never shut up did so in Japanese. The brain tunes out what it can’t understand.

I would LOVE it if my coworkers decided to talk in Spanish all day. I’d buy them lessons.

76

It does get to me when it’s a language that I somewhat understand but am not fluent. My brain keeps trying to translate even though I keep telling it not to.

77

That would depend on the size of the room too… I’ve worked in places where my team shared a room with 200 other people. One of them was (in part) a call center, with no partitions and no headsets: we could barely hear our own thoughts, much less the conversation of a group sitting at another row of desks.

Many of them DO, but they’re not conscious of it. I got the contact policies for a multinational company’s Support Desk changed by getting their manager to realize that he, who’d had three years of HS Spanish and by his own reckoning did not speak any language other than English, was requiring people for whom English was an Nth language to contact Support by phone and in English exclusively. Within that same workweek they started monitoring the mailbox and made IM (used throughout the company for other things) available as a contact tool.

78

I have worked across cultures, in India, UK and now the US. Whether talking in a foreign language is considered rude is a function of organizational culture, as much as it is a personal one.

In India, as you might guess, people speaking in their native tongues is the rule rather than the exception. In fact, many organizations only loosely define - if at all - what the official conversational language is. (With globally-oriented companies, the rules are more clearly defined, especially in the presence of foreign visitors.) For the most part, however, the office buzzes with so many languages, you’d need an Universal Translator out of Star Trek if you’d like to know everything being said.

Indians even type out email in English with the words reading vernacular. You wouldn’t even know what the heck the language is. And they send such mails to the entire workforce group mailbox. Charming! :smiley:

The British are really uptight about their precious little English language. At least, the folks I used to work with were so. They’d frown upon my conversation in Tamil - with my family back in India, in the breakout area! That’s paranoid. Speak a word in your native, in your cube, and your boss will know about it in short notice.

The American dudes are far more relaxed, and a lot less bothered by foreign languages in the workplace. Again I have worked in several cultures, from conservative companies that seem unconfortable with non-English, to really open dynamic ones that do not seem to mind at all.

All said, American workplaces are probably the best in the world if you, like me, like to yakk in Hindi and Tamil.

79

No, the purpose of the break room is to have a place away from one’s workstation to take a break. Any socializing is optional.

80

So basically everyone who doesn’t speak Spanish needs to deal with it, but you’re offended when they talk about a party you’re not invited to so they have to leave the room to talk about it or speak a different language, basically going out of THEIR way so that you’re not offended? Understood… Instead of only speaking English in regards to work related matters, I’d try speaking English to English speaking people socially. Otherwise you may be isolating yourself by allowing yourself to be marginalized when you only speak English when discussing work related matters.

The moral of the story is its not anyones fault but yours if you feel you’re not included in social gatherings outside of work.

Being a latino myself I know for a fact that latinos talk smack about people amongst groups or out in the open in Spanish so the person doesn’t understand. Its rude and unprofessional to speak a different language at work around people who don’t speak your language… IMHO. I don’t do it and when people approach me at work speaking Spanish I respond in English.