BBC Radio 4 2016-02-22

BBC Radio 4 2016-02-22

Whatever else the last few weeks have shown about the European Community, one thing is very impressive – the ability of mainland European politicians to speak our language. I listened one day in rapt attention while a Polish government minister spoke in highly sophisticated English using complex sentence constructions. It made me wonder how many British parliamentarians have proved themselves as fluent in a second language.

Of course, it's something we have come to expect. Twice in the last fortnight I had to stay overnight in a London hotel. On each occasion there were two receptionists representing different nations yet all able to speak and even joke in English with great ease. I tried to remember when I was last in a continental hotel where there was a British receptionist with such an enviable command of the local lingo..

Is it that we expect the rest of the world to speak English? Or is it that we have never been convinced of the value of having a second language in our vocabulary? As a nation which increasingly relies on tourism as a source of income, one would think that encouraging our own young people to be fluent in Spanish, Mandarin or Arabic might be preferable to relying on other European nationals to service our tourist industry.

When some years ago the Japanese theologian Kosuke Koyama addressed an international student gathering in Edinburgh, he spoke of how when he moved to the USA he found it disquieting to go to a church where God was addressed in American English rather than in Japanese. But then he had a moment of enlightenment which led him to realise that, in his words, 'the Mother-tongue God is too small.'

It was when he engaged with people who shared his faith but articulated that in a language not his own that he realised that God was bigger than his nation, bigger than his church, bigger than his theology.

I endorse that fully. Whether it has been working abroad or engaging with people from other continents who live in Britain, I have always found my religious presumptions challenged as the God who seems so much at home in English is revealed to have no favoured mother tongue.

And, quite apart from religion, when I have plucked up the confidence to risk getting things wrong in attempting to speak French or Dutch, I am always amazed at how native speakers become more open and encouraging when they feel their nation, language and culture are being taken seriously In such circumstances I think less of how advantageous it is that so many people speak English and more of how presumptuous it is to think that all the world should be like us.