Before my trip to Italy, I spent a few months learning the basics of Italian. I wasn’t trying to get fluent, but I wanted to be able to say a few basic phrases and muddle my way through a conversation if I wanted to go to a restaurant or bar that wasn’t frequented by tourists. So I tried to learn the phrases that I thought I’d need most often. “Can I have a beer, please?” “Where is the bathroom?” “I’m sorry.” “Can I talk to a lawyer?” Stuff like that.
But, almost without fail, my conversations were in English. More often than not, they’d start the conversation in English. If I started with Italian, they’d speak English until I switched. Since I was wearing neutral clothing (no USA flag t-shirts or Make America Great Again hats here), I wasn’t sure how they knew that I spoke English before I started speaking. I asked a friend about it, and he suggested that it might be because I was wearing sunglasses. Apparently Americans are more likely to wear sunglasses than Europeans. I’m not sure how much I believe that, but it’s a theory. I chalked up my language experience in Italy to the fact that my Italian was pretty bad, so it was less painful for them to speak English than for them to hear me butcher their language.*
As I prepared for my trip to Spain, I was much more optimistic about my language prospects. My Spanish, while rough, is passable, and I feel relatively confident in my ability to have a limited conversation with anyone in Spanish, and I was looking forward to the opportunity to practice and improve my language skills. I can understand what’s being said much better than I can speak, but between my Spanish and a little charades, I figured I’d be able to converse effectively enough. But, just like in Italy, I was often relegated to English, even in some of the smaller towns. Perhaps it was because I was picking bars and restaurants that were frequented by tourists and the staff spoke English, but I still felt like there had to be a reason why people started talking to me in English even before I opened my mouth.
Finally, after completing a purchase at a store, I asked the store owner why he spoke to me in English. He explained that, when I walked in the store, it was fairly evident that I wasn’t Spanish. And, since I’m not Spanish, the only other language that he could converse in was English. So, he explained, anyone that came into the store that didn’t look like a Spaniard got English. I can only assume that the same was true in Italy, which makes sense.
The punchline to this story is that I’ve spent the past two weeks in Miami. I’ve had more conversations started with me in Spanish in Miami in two weeks than I did in 5 weeks in Spain. In Europe, I look like an American. In America, I look Latino. Wherever I go, I look like a foreigner. I should go to Sri Lanka and see what happens. They’ll probably talk to me in Russian or one of those clicky African languages.
* The Italian language wasn’t really standardized as a single language until relatively recently in history. Since Italy was a group of smaller regions and fiefdoms, each had their own language and dialect. The Tuscan dialect was one of the more widely spoken, given Tuscany’s location in the middle of Italy and their role as a commercial center. During the 15th century, several writers attempted to help drive towards a standardized Italian language, including Dante Alighieri (although Dante included Sicilian in some of his poems). Grammarians in the 15th and 16th centuries also worked to standardize the Italian language, relying heavily on the Tuscan dialect. Two other classic authors, Petrarca and Boccaccio, were used as examples of Italian language, which resulted in the Florentine version of Italian being the standard for Italian writing. The first Italian dictionary was published in the early 17th century and leaned heavily on the literature of these writers, further helping to cement Tuscan Italian as the standard. When Italy was finally unified in 1861, there were, unsurprisingly, significant social changes that came with the unification, including mandatory schooling. As literacy rates increased, many Italians focused on the national Italian language over their regional dialects.
