My World View: Global versus tribal speech

• The learning of a foreign language is not as difficult as is imagined by many adults in English-speaking countries who have no foreign language skills. This applies chiefly in parts of the USA, in Britain and perhaps in Australia. Even in other parts of these countries or the societies in them, and certainly in most other countries of the world, a high proportion of people speak two or more languages. In South African a lot of the black African people speak several languages, perhaps seven or more including Swahili, Zulu, several others, as well as English (and even sometimes some Afrikaans). This is (as I understand) a statement of fact rather than mere perception.
• The implication of this fact is that, in cases such as that of black children's experience in school in certain parts of America (and now Britain again) and also that of linguistic or national minorities such as the Welsh in Britain and the Bretons in France, there need be no conflict between the wish of the group to use their own language and the wish of the nation as a whole for them to be proficient in the larger community's language: the answer is simply for the group to become bilingual. If black kids in Chicago or Peckham feel it is their "human" right to talk a distinct speech of their own, with different grammar and perhaps incomprehensible to ordinary speakers of the standard English of their nation, they need not be punished (as such groups were in past generations) for using their own language; but they must be required to be proficient in standard English and to be able to do work in other mainstream school subjects in the other language. There are schools in Russia where children do many lessons in English (that is, not just English language lessons) from the age of nine. So the issue of precisely how much of school lessons in schools in Wales should be in English and how much in Welsh might remain a point of contention; but in those communities where people speak Welsh at home they should be bilingual, able to work in English but free to do so in Welsh outside school if (after leaving school) they are in a Welsh speaking environment. And the same should apply to Bretons in France; however France has a history of being more authoritarian about imposing French on the Bretons even than the English on the Welsh. But children are extremely adept at mastering languages when they want to; the issue is not about ability or even the time needed; it is about motivation. Whether cases like Welsh or Breton are resolved the way the nationalists would like is more about politics than pure social and linguistic identity, so whether those causes ever reach contentment we shall have to wait and see; but black children in English city housing estates speaking in a TV documentary in January 2008 were heard using styles and accents far from standard English so that they needed subtitles — but then, so did white children in Glasgow. People invest so much of their community identities in the way they speak that the tension between the separation of localities and tribes on the one hand, and the unifying, standardizing effects of mass media (currently still chiefly television) on the other, will probably exist for ever, unless the internet replaces TV or these two media together become so individualized for particular regions and groups that the commonality is ultimately lost.