Heracles and I did provide the information you requested for Canada: see posts 5 and 9.
In Belgium, it is usual for big- and medium-sized companies to offer the possibility to speak either in Dutch of French. While it’s not legally compulsory, it’s extremely common in practice, especially in and around Brussels. There’s no fixed order for the languages, though i.e. Dutch isn’t always “1” and French “2”. It depends on the company I guess.
English and German are occasionally available, too.
In Israel, it’s usually 1 for Hebrew, 2 for Arabic, 3 for Russian. Sometimes you also get English or Amharic.
This is somewhat off-topic, but what I want to hear is “Press 1 if you prefer to speak with a human being and avoid this silly automated tree.”
And FWIW, I thought the OP was straightforward and benign. But then I don’t look for hidden agendas under normal circumstances…
I’ve encountered a few phone numbers with language options in the UK (usually NHS numbers IIRC, since they’re the government service that requires the widest level of accessibility) but it’s neither common nor consistently applied. More often it’s the written material that is available in umpteen languages, not the phone menus.
And for the record, I don’t feel aggrieved or oppressed by having to press 1 for English, or at least no more than I do about having to deal with the voice mail system in the first place. People who fret about this need to get a life. Maybe they should have a “press 5 to unbunch your panties” option or something.
In Australia, we sometimes (not always) get an press 1 for English option, with Options 2 or 3 being Chinese (Mandarin) and sometimes Vietnamese. My company offers international calling cards, so understandably we have press 1 for English and press another number for something approaching the technical measure of a ‘metric asston’ of other languages, most of them Asian and African (including south Asia).
All official documents are available in a bazillion languages.
In terms of origins and immigrants, here is very much like the US. As far as I am aware (I’ve only been here 10 years) there’s no official language. and Arabic.
The answer is that you don’t often hear “press 1 for English”. I think that in the 10 years since it has supposedly been popular I have heard the option maybe a handful of times. The vast majority of the time it is like “press 2 for spanish” with the default option being English if nothing is pressed.
So maybe you just happen to often call one of those companies that is the exception, or are conflating the few times it has happened into something that happens on a regular basis.
Sometimes, yes, specially if calling a company or government located in one of the dual-language areas or one which deals with a lot of foreigners. As a political statement, some companies offer options in their local language and in foreign languages but not in Spanish.
FWIW, in the Netherlands I have found quite a few times the option to choose among languages when calling service numbers.
The weirdest one is the one at the practice of my family doctor – when you call, you get a message that says “for English, please press 9”. I wonder, why “9”? O.o The only options are Dutch and English-- And the buttons to press are, respectively, “1” and “9”.
maybe to avoid fat-fingering? 1 and 2 are close together; 1 and 9 are as far apart as you can get.
The United States has no official language.
The United States has no official language.
Actually, when the country was founded, German was very common in Pennsylvania, and in some neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Yiddish (a Jewish variant of German) is only spoken.
This is something that really doesn’t bother me, but it pisses the rest of my family off. As does seeing official documents available in Spanish. It’s so weird to me to get pissed off by this. Would it be ideal for all immigrants to speak English, illegal or not? Yeah, but it’s not realistic. Like it or not, they’re here and many of them aren’t able to learn the language for one reason or another. I think a lot of the issue is, that for a very large number of Americans, Mexico isn’t our ‘neighbor’. It’s ‘that country’ where all the illegals come from. So any thing that even hints that we treat them as equals is not accepted. We’re not like European countries who more or less see the other countries as equals. It’s kinda sad really, but unfortunately I don’t see it changing any time soon.
I should probably know better, but I’m generally stupid, so…
The crux of the issue is the first words in the quoted post. The OP asked “If others..”,Procrustus asks “why do…” - two very different questions. It’s the difference between reading a post and reading into a post. I tend to read the words and, as such, probably miss subtextual clues more often than not. Other board participants are on the opposite side of the scale and tend to read subtext where there is none.
Que sera sera (press 1 for English translation).
Maybe if this had been posted in GQ rather than IMHO, not so many posters would not have felt the need to wax on about how multilingual other nations are and how Latino Americans are people too. You know, answered the question instead.
As pointed out, however, the question makes no sense as merely a question. *** Of course ***the same thing happens wherever there are phones. It’s hard to take the question seriously as a factual inquiry and not a political commentary.
It’s like asking “Do other countries other than the U.S. have just two major right wing political parties?”
To what extent it happens in other countries with phones is certainly a valid question. I don’t think it’s like your clearly loaded example at all.
Answers have been offered for Canada, China, Cameroon, Thailand, Czech Republic, UK, Belgium, Israel, Australia, Spain and the Netherlands.
But the answer was always pretty obvious, though - if there is sufficient demand for service in multiple languages, companies will consider providing such service. It’s not unique to the US.
Makes sense. I haven’t had to call any NHS service in a while apart from my local GP. I did work for the DWP for a while and we were required to provide service in as many languages as as possible, but we did it via a live interpreter. It wasn’t something selected on the IVR.
You missed France, where posters said it is not common. But now that we know it’s not unique to the US, we know that the OP was clearly trolling or making a political comment.