The Queen’s speech

De­spite the British gov­ern­ment’s crow­ing about Brexit hav­ing hap­pened, it hasn’t: the doc­u­ments signed on ’Brexit Day’ – Feb­ru­ary 1st, 2020 – sim­ply marked the start of the final Brexit ne­go­ti­a­tions with the EU, which could go on for a year. Or five. Or ten. Nonethe­less, for some Eng­lish peo­ple, those sig­na­tures have al­lowed them to give full vent to a dark side of their na­tional pride. To whit, this mes­sage that ap­peared stuck to the doors of a block of flats in Nor­wich: ’As we fi­nally have our great coun­try back...we do not tol­er­ate peo­ple speak­ing other lan­guages than Eng­lish in the flats....the the [sic] Queens Eng­lish [sic] is the spo­ken tongue here....If you do want to speak the mother tongue of what­ever coun­try you come from, then we sug­gest you re­turn to that place...and we can re­turn to what was nor­mal­ity be­fore you in­fected this once great is­land...You won’t have long till our gov­ern­ment will im­ple­ment rules that puts British [sic] first...”. Aside from the poor punc­tu­a­tion, the odd re­peated word, the omis­sion of the apos­tro­phe S in the key phrase ’the Queen’s Eng­lish’ (howlers don’t come much louder), and the fact that there is no lan­guage called ’British’, it’s the tone of the piece which gives its xeno­pho­bic game away. All coun­tries ex­cept Britain are ear­marked as sec­ond rate - ’that place’ - and it is taken for granted that the sup­posed great­ness of Britain will re­turn the in­stant the for­eign­ers who have con­t­a­m­i­nated the coun­try have made them­selves scarce. Now, no one is sug­gest­ing that most Eng­lish peo­ple har­bour such thoughts, but the fact that one of them was ca­pa­ble of plas­ter­ing them all over his or her neigh­bours’ doors sug­gests that this un­per­son­able per­son is not alone by any means.

Imag­ine, if you will, that all those British pass­port bear­ers who are liv­ing out the win­ters of their lives along the sum­mery coasts of Spain and Cat­alo­nia were sud­denly asked to speak only Span­ish (or only Cata­lan, a lan­guage whose ex­is­tence a not in­signif­i­cant mi­nor­ity of them barely tol­er­ate). Or imag­ine that the 100,000 Britons cur­rently liv­ing in Ger­many were told to speak ’only Ger­man’ in their flats? To add hypocrisy to in­jury, the au­thor of the Nor­wich pam­phlet is ask­ing a lot more of for­eign­ers than he or she is of the British: in the UK, ac­cord­ing to the 2011 cen­sus, 62% of the pop­u­la­tion is mono­lin­gual, 38% speak at least one for­eign lan­guage (usu­ally French) and just 14% speak two for­eign lan­guages. Seen from the Cata­lan point of view this looks, well, pa­thetic, given that ac­cord­ing to a 2018 sur­vey no less than 81.2% of the pop­u­la­tion is at least bilin­gual (Cata­lan and Span­ish), with many of them speak­ing a third lan­guage (Ara­bic, Amazic, Urdu, Quechua, Man­darin, Ro­man­ian and Eng­lish being among the most promi­nent). As for other EU coun­tries, in the Nether­lands 77% of the pop­u­la­tion speak at least two other lan­guages apart from their na­tive one; in Slove­nia, 67%; in Den­mark 58%. How­ever, the fact that Eng­lish peo­ple are among the worst lan­guage learn­ers in Eu­rope doesn’t pre­vent them from trav­el­ling to what they like to call the Con­ti­nent on a fre­quent basis. Could it be that it is pre­cisely those Anglo-Sax­ons who, when in Cat­alo­nia, by de­fault order their drinks, food and, in­deed, any­thing else they think they need, in loud, some­times deaf­en­ing Eng­lish, who have a sim­i­lar or at least an over­lap­ping mind-set with that of the anony­mous au­thor of the Nor­wich man­i­festo? We think it could. In the con­di­tional, mind.