Transcript

Jim:

I’ve been sort of told this so often in the different places I’ve worked that really English is not the language of England any more or America or United States. It’s a language which has been appropriated by different groups, different countries around the world. So, I kind of think of it in those ways really now, I think.

Nadia:

Quite generous of you …

Teija:

… Actually, actually it means that we are stealing your language. I do …

[interposing voices and laughter]

Jim:

… I still have it.

Teija:

You still have it, but I do agree with Nadia because it’s wonderful to have er a mother tongue like Finnish. No one is understanding and er it’s, actually, I think it’s a good thing and at the same time I can steal your language and use it when I need it …

Jim:

… This was the experience that I got in the Netherlands that um the Dutch people could speak English very well and so I worked in the banks there teaching language in banks, and er, teaching English in banks and if they had English in, er visiting employees the whole of the organisation would um the whole of the meeting would be carried out in English. All the Dutch people would speak in English for one English person and sometimes I did used to think to myself, and Dutch people used to say it, they felt rather proud of the fact that they could do that and that we couldn’t learn their language. So I was determined to learn their language.

[laughter]

Nadia:

There’s one more issue I would like to point out and this has to um something to say with the development of … the scientific language and I find it quite interesting that English is the scientific community language. But on the other hand as a French speaker or German speaker um I resent the fact that the language is, our language, is not going to evolve in a scientific language. And it’s almost difficult for me to make a presentation in French in my research topics because I’ve been spending years and years reading and writing in English and so if I have to explain these things in French now I don’t have the, I mean, I don’t have the proper flow, the proper rhythm and the academic language as it should be used by an academic. So this is one other aspect. It’s not directly an effect of what we’ve been doing in this project, but it’s on the long term it’s like kind of cutting the development of the other languages that we use English so frequently in the scientific circles.

Jim:

It reminds me of an experience from the Netherlands. It’s not from our project now that we’re working on, but I remember working with a group of university lecturers who were learning English for lecturing purposes and there was an Austrian er woman in the group. She had moved from Austria to the Netherlands and she had … and she had learned Dutch and now she was in an English language class. And she actually started crying in the middle of the class because in the course of our discussion, because we were discussing language, she suddenly said, ‘I don’t speak English properly. I don’t speak Dutch properly and I don’t speak my own language, German, properly any more,’ and it was really distressing for her.

Nadia:

It can be. I can understand that.