# National pride

- Link: https://www.kuechenserver.org/2011/02/25/national-pride/
- Published: 2011-02-25T00:18:53+01:00
- Author: Christian Krakau-Louis

Normally, I make it a personal principle to not blog about my job. However this 
job brings me to many different places in all different countries and one of these
trips – the most recent one – nurtured my wish to share a few thoughts about national
pride:

This week I had the questionable pleasure to visit France once again. I’ve only 
been there for a little more than 24 hours, spending a good 10 of them in business
meetings of all kind (Dinners with business partners, technical meetings and the
like).

And guess what? A good 95% of all communication was done in French. Of course. I
do understand this to a degree – at least we are in France – but even though I made
it crystal clear that I simply can’t speak let alone understand this language to
a degree I’d call acceptable, nobody even tried to integrate me into a longer conversation.
Of course, there were some small talk tries in English, but they faded away once
we were 5 minutes into a discussion.

On the other hand, I’ve been to e.g. Russia, Belarus, Jordan, India, Italy and Slovenia
on business trips; countries where I feared greater language related problems. But,
to my surprise, most of those countries seem to host a great deal of language wizards;
in Slovenia for example to my surprise most people working in the service industry
were fluent in at least two foreign Languages, English and German. And most of them
also claimed to be able to speak a good bit of Italian on the side.

But, it seems that there is not a big deal of English spoken in France and even 
if the people get along with the language, they feel that it’s unnecessary to switch
to a language everybody in the room can understand.

This is of course not so much the case in multi-national companies, but there is
also the tendency to fall back to your local language.

I myself also feel more comfortable in speaking German among Germans, especially
when being in Germany – but within our company, where English is the official company
language despite the fact that we are a German company, we even hold meetings with
40+ participant in English if there are only one or two non-Germans in them. So 
I know both sides, the one that prefers the native language, the other one that 
doesn’t want to exclude somebody from the discussion.

Maybe it’s arrogant to go to a foreign country and expect to come along with English
and German only, maybe it’s something you should be able to expect – I can’t tell.
But, it seems that countries with better language skills can take part in the Global
knowledge transfer; countries with little foreign language knowledge – e.g. China–
on the other hand, seem to be cut out.

I wonder how you would react if you had a guest from abroad in a meeting. Would 
you carry on with your native language? Would you try and switch the whole meeting
to English? Is it okay to hold a meeting in English, if you have 40 participants
and two of them can’t speak the local language? Is it on the other hand maybe even
necessary?

How much national pride is too much pride?

I’m really interested in your thoughts about that. And thank all the French people
I’ve met along the way who took the extra effort to communicate in English – especially
Gwenael, whom I haven’t met for a way too long time.

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