When I was get­ting my master’s degree in Teach­ing Eng­lish to Speak­ers of Other Lan­guages (TESOL), we learned about a study – I wish I could remem­ber the details, but it’s been more than 20 years, and I have for­got­ten – which mea­sured the responses of peo­ple on a sub­way who spoke only Eng­lish to a con­ver­sa­tion tak­ing place between a man and a woman speak­ing a lan­guage other than Eng­lish. If I recall, one of the most com­mon reac­tions the English-only speak­ing pas­sen­gers had was to sus­pect that the cou­ple was talk­ing about them, or per­haps about Amer­i­cans in gen­eral, and the assump­tion was almost always that what­ever the cou­ple had been say­ing, it couldn’t have been nice.

That kind of xeno­pho­bia, often mixed with racism, emerges quite com­monly when dis­cus­sions of lin­guis­tic plu­ral­ism or tol­er­ance turn to the ques­tion of the degree to which United States soci­ety and cul­ture can accom­mo­date the pub­lic use, offi­cial and unof­fi­cial, of lan­guages other than Eng­lish. When my wife and I decided to raise our son to be bilin­gual, for exam­ple, and we chose to speak only, or at least pre­dom­i­nantly, Per­sian to him for the first cou­ple of years of his life, mem­bers of my fam­ily were very con­cerned that we were set­ting him up for ridicule, and even fail­ure, because they were sure not only that he would learn to speak Eng­lish with an Iran­ian accent, but that there was a good chance he would speak Eng­lish ungram­mat­i­cally. What both­ered me, how­ever, was not this prac­ti­cal con­cern my rel­a­tives had about whether or not my son would acquire Eng­lish as a native speaker. Mis­placed as that con­cern is – chil­dren are, after all, lan­guage sponges and can, if they start young enough, learn to speak mul­ti­ple lan­guages flu­ently, with the appro­pri­ate accent in each, with­out any trou­ble at all – I think it’s not an unrea­son­able one for peo­ple to have who have not yet thought closely about how chil­dren are social­ized into their native lan­guage. No mat­ter how exclu­sively my wife and I might have tried to speak only Per­sian with him, for exam­ple, he was immersed in the cul­ture that is Amer­i­can Eng­lish in almost every other aspect of his life. It would have been dif­fi­cult, espe­cially since Eng­lish is my native lan­guage, for him not to have acquired Eng­lish as a native speaker.

Rather, what trou­bled me about my rel­a­tives’ response was the anger, the tone of one who has been betrayed, that entered their voices, when they would tell me things like, “He’s never going to sound Amer­i­can, you know, and he’s going to hate you for that when he’s older.” Over time, despite the fact that we tried as much as pos­si­ble to speak Eng­lish to our son when peo­ple who didn’t speak Per­sian were around, it became clear that much of what some of my fam­ily mem­bers resented was that they couldn’t under­stand what my wife was say­ing to our son when she spoke to him in her lan­guage. Not that I don’t under­stand the dis­com­fort that being unable to com­pre­hend the lan­guage spo­ken by the peo­ple stand­ing next to you can make you feel. In the late 1980s, I lived for about a year and a half in South Korea, and I nei­ther spoke nor read a word of Korean when I got there. It was fright­en­ing. More­over, unlike the peo­ple in the study I described above – who had no way of know­ing what the con­ver­sa­tions they were over­hear­ing were about – I knew for a fact that a lot of the peo­ple I rode the train with every day, whose con­ver­sa­tions I could not pen­e­trate even the slight­est frac­tion of an inch, or whom I passed in the street, or stood on line with at the bank, were often talk­ing about me, and I knew this because they were not shy about point­ing at me while they were say­ing what­ever it was they had to say.

It was very hard at first not to assume that at least some of what they were say­ing was less than flat­ter­ing, though I learned over time that most were prob­a­bly just say­ing an adult ver­sion of what the kids in my Chamshil apart­ment com­plex would say every time I walked past, point­ing and laugh­ing with a delighted curios­ity at the strange­ness of my pres­ence: Migook saram! Migook saram imnida! (An Amer­i­can! It’s an Amer­i­can!). Still, I have never under­stood the atti­tude, which I have only ever heard expressed by Amer­i­cans, dis­played so promi­nently by two guys from Chicago who were in Seoul for a med­ical con­fer­ence of some sort. I know where they were from and why they were in Korea because my friends and I, all of us Eng­lish teach­ers at the same school in Yoksam-Dong, over­heard their con­ver­sa­tion in the Pizza Inn (or maybe it was Pizza Hut, I am not sure) in the Sam­sung Build­ing, which was one of the places we’d go for lunch when we had a crav­ing for west­ern food. These two men wanted what­ever kind of over­loaded pizza they were try­ing to order with­out one of the top­pings on the menu, black olives, which they were try­ing with­out much suc­cess to explain to their wait­ress, whose Eng­lish was not very good and who was very flus­tered at hav­ing to use it, espe­cially as she could sense the ris­ing frus­tra­tion in her customer’s voices when it became clear to them that she wasn’t really under­stand­ing what they wanted. Finally, the wait­ress said, “Okay, okay!” as if she under­stood and went back into the kitchen. When she brought out their order a lit­tle while later, though, there were black olives on the pizza, and the guys from Chicago were furi­ous. They didn’t exactly yell at the wait­ress, but their voices were raised as they demon­strated what they wanted by pick­ing the olives off their food and set­ting them aside. This time the look on the wait­ress’ face con­firmed that she had indeed under­stood what the men from Chicago wanted, and she took the incor­rect order and went back into the kitchen.

I don’t remem­ber why none of us tried to inter­vene, since there were those among us whose Korean was good enough to defuse the whole sit­u­a­tion, but after the wait­ress had gone back into the kitchen, one of the guys leaned over the table and in a voice choked with anger and frus­tra­tion said, “Why don’t these peo­ple learn to speak the fuck­ing lan­guage!” His friend nod­ded, said, “Do you want to leave?” and they walked out.

When­ever I tell that story these days, I am reminded of a joke I read I-wish-I-could-remember-where:

An immi­grant father is quizzing his daugh­ter on her vocab­u­lary. “What do you call some­one who speaks two lan­guages?” he asks her.

“Bilin­gual,” the girl answers.

“Some­one who speaks three languages?”

“Trilin­gual.”

“And what do you call some­one who speaks more than three languages?”

“Poly­glot.”

“Good job!” the father smiles. “Now, what do you call some­one who speaks only one language?”

“An Amer­i­can.”

The truth that sits at the cen­ter of the stereo­type this joke pokes fun at is one I have spent much of my pro­fes­sional life fight­ing to change, and so it was with no small sense of irony that I found myself think­ing when I walked a cou­ple of nights ago out of the new Bravo super­mar­ket around the cor­ner from where I live not, “Why don’t they learn to speak the fuck­ing lan­guage?” but some­thing close to it: “If they know the lan­guage, why don’t they fuck­ing speak it?”

My neigh­bor­hood is one of the most diverse in the United States. I don’t remem­ber the pre­cise num­bers, but the peo­ple who live here either come from 60 or so dif­fer­ent coun­tries and speak 80 or so dif­fer­ent lan­guages, or it’s the other way around: 80 or so dif­fer­ent coun­tries and 60 or so dif­fer­ent lan­guages. You can walk down the main avenue and hear Span­ish, Ital­ian, Per­sian, Russ­ian, Ara­bic, French, Pol­ish, Yid­dish, Chi­nese, Korean, Urdu, Hindi, Thai, Viet­namese and more. As you might imag­ine, the busi­nesses here that are most suc­cess­ful have man­aged to nav­i­gate the pol­i­tics of lan­guage that inevitably emerge in such a poly­glot place in ways that strive to make every­one feel wel­come, from putting signs in dif­fer­ent lan­guages up in their stores to try­ing to hire a range of peo­ple to rep­re­sent the range of lan­guages in the com­mu­nity; and I have seen store keep­ers greet­ing reg­u­lar cus­tomers in their own lan­guages, noth­ing more than a sim­ple hello and good­bye, and maybe How are you?, but that lit­tle bit goes a long way towards mak­ing these cus­tomers feel wel­come, and it con­tributes to the sense of neigh­bor­hood that exists here.

There are, of course, times when the per­son who is behind the counter, or tak­ing your order in a restau­rant, is a new immi­grant to whom the boss has given a job, maybe the newcomer’s first in this coun­try, and whose Eng­lish is cor­re­spond­ingly poor. Frus­trat­ing as those sit­u­a­tions can be, though, in my expe­ri­ence any­way, the man­ager or store owner, whose Eng­lish is usu­ally quite good, has always been there to help. The other night, how­ever, it was the man­ager who was the prob­lem. Here’s what hap­pened: One of my neigh­bors was on line ahead of me. When the cashier rang up a can of peanuts my neigh­bor wanted to buy, some­thing strange must have come up on the reg­is­ter because she called the man­ager, and the two of them started to speak in Span­ish about what­ever was com­ing up on the reg­is­ter each time they tried to ring up the peanuts. After about a half a minute, my neigh­bor, who does not speak Span­ish, asked in Eng­lish, “What’s wrong?” The man­ager ignored her and con­tin­ued to to talk to the cashier in Span­ish, ges­tur­ing at the price on the reg­is­ter and swip­ing his manager’s card a cou­ple of times. This went on for another thirty sec­onds or so, and my neigh­bor, with some real exas­per­a­tion in her voice, said, “Look, the can is marked $0.99.” The man­ager glanced at her and went back to speak­ing Span­ish with the cashier. My neigh­bor repeated what she said about the price marked on the can, the ris­ing anger in her voice mak­ing it clear that she would not allow her­self to be so eas­ily put off again. The man­ager stopped talk­ing, said, “Okay.” Then he pushed some but­tons on the reg­is­ter; my neigh­bor was charged $0.99; the cashier bagged my neighbor’s pur­chase and turned to begin ring­ing up the next customer.

Includ­ing that next per­son, there were three peo­ple on line ahead of me, and it became quite appar­ent as I watched them inter­act with the cashier, that the cashier spoke Eng­lish pretty well. Just as she was fin­ished ring­ing me up, I noticed that my neigh­bor was still stand­ing near the reg­is­ter exam­in­ing her receipt. She went up to the man­ager, pointed to her receipt and said, “Wait a minute! Are these peanuts sup­posed to be 3/$2.00?”

The man­ager answered, “Yes.”

“But that means,” my neigh­bor con­tin­ued, “I should have been charged only $0.66 or $0.67 for the can I bought, right?”

“Well, you said you wanted me to charge you $0.99,” the man­ager responded. “So that’s what I charged you.”

At this point, my pur­chase was com­plete and I started walk­ing towards the door. I wanted to stick around in case my neigh­bor needed any sup­port, but I couldn’t. The last thing I heard as I left the store was my neigh­bor say­ing, “Lis­ten, I want to be charged the right price,” and when I turned around, I saw the man­ager was walk­ing with her back to the reg­is­ter, so I assumed he was going to refund her the $0.33 she’d been overcharged.

I walked home angry in a way I don’t think I have ever been angry before. I was, of course, indig­nant on my neighbor’s behalf. Since both the man­ager and the cashier clearly spoke Eng­lish well enough, the ini­tial con­ver­sa­tion about the over­charge did not have to take place in Span­ish, which had the effect of exclud­ing my neigh­bor from know­ing what was going on with her own pur­chase. More than that, though, I thought about the fact that this Bravo super­mar­ket is replac­ing a Met Food that had been in the neigh­bor­hood, if I remem­ber cor­rectly, for nearly 30 years. In the twelve years that I shopped at that Met Food, I don’t think I saw a sin­gle per­son work­ing there who was not bilin­gual. Yet, I also never saw store employ­ees do what the Bravo employ­ees did, exclude a cus­tomer from a con­ver­sa­tion about her or his pur­chase by speak­ing a lan­guage the cus­tomer did not under­stand. I haven’t seen my neigh­bor since this hap­pened, and so I don’t know what took place after I left the store. I do know, how­ever, that I will be pay­ing close atten­tion, closer than I nor­mally might, to how Bravo’s employ­ees deal with the pol­i­tics of lan­guage in this neigh­bor­hood they are try­ing to do busi­ness in, and this is new for me: that how some­one uses her or his non-English, native lan­guage might be a fac­tor in whether or not I decide to give that per­son my busi­ness.