Taking Offense

I keep seeing the above commercial, an advert for Emirates airlines, and something about it makes me feel uncomfortable. It's trying to show how their flight crews, like pretty much every flight crew on any international airline, is multilingual. It starts by showing a couple of different flight attendants getting ready for the day. One has a love note written in Italian, and another waves and greets someone "bonjour." Then, on the actual flight, one of the attendants greets a vaguely Asian looking man in Chinese, to which the man, who apparently doesn't speak Chinese, responds with an awkward, "Thanks. I think." They then both have a good laugh because racial profiling is funny.

Perhaps I'm simply overreacting to what is obviously meant to be a joke (though between you and me, I'm not). I had a friend who was of Korean descent when I was in college, and she told me all the time how annoyed she was that people were always trying to speak Chinese with her because 1) her family was originally from Korea, not China, and 2) she was American and spoke neither language. But to me at least, this all raises an interesting question: in an increasingly multilingual, multicultural world that doesn't remotely resemble a small village how do you decide which language to initiate a conversation with?

I first asked myself this question when I was taking a sociolinguistics course in graduate school. I had just come from living in Hungary for a year, and while there I would frequently visit museums in Budapest. I'd be, say, in the gift shop and want to ask someone who worked there a question. I would ask in Hungarian, and invariably they would answer me in English, which I found to be incredibly frustrating. I had, after all, initiated the conversation and chosen the language I wanted to speak in. I even took offense at this because I felt it was a judgement on my ability to speak Hungarian, as though they were saying that I couldn't possibly speak their language, so let's talk in English. The theory I ultimately came up with for why they did this to me was that it all comes down to context. I was, after all, at a museum frequented by tourists. Though I lived in the country, I was a few hours outside of Budapest, so I had a backpack on to carry some food with me, which made me look exactly like any other tourist who didn't really speak Hungarian, which is why they switched to English.

The context of this Emirates airlines flight is essential to determine whether the flight attendant's actions were borderline racist or not, that is, where was this airplane going? If it was a flight from Dubai to Beijing and a lot of the passengers were Chinese, then it was probably just an honest mistake. If, however, this was a flight from Dubai to, say, London, it seems a bit more like he was only speaking Chinese because the guy kind of looked Chinese. This is reminiscent of the experience I had when I was on a LOT Polish flight from Chicago to Warsaw, and the majority of the passengers were Polish. The flight crew would speak to me in Polish too, which at first I found annoying, but in retrospect makes perfect sense. After all, we were going to Poland, on the Polish national airline, and I easily look like I could be Polish. But then again, if I were to imagine a different scenario, where I were, say, flying to South America on Aerolineas Argentinas, and the flight crew began to address me in Polish, I would have to ask myself what it was about me that seemed to scream Polish. In a different context, choosing a different language would seem absurd.

Of course, the question is if this kind of racial profiling is really such a big deal. After all, when I was visiting Malaysia last month, I didn't mind people immediately speaking English to me because I was white. It really sped things up. If they kept addressing me in Malaysian, I would have constantly had to explain that I don't speak their language. The answer, I think, might have something to do with prestige, or the value society places on a language. Even if someone is vehemently anti-American, it's hard for me to imagine that person taking offense at being addressed in English because the language is very prestigious. After all, what I'm saying is that you don't look like you're from around here, but you look well-educated and cosmopolitan, so naturally you speak English.

Last year, I was in Slovakia with my mother visiting some of the villages where our Hungarian ancestry comes from, and I made a point of initiating conversations with the little bit of Slovak I know at first until ascertaining whether the people I was conversing with spoke Hungarian, the language I felt more comfortable with. This was probably a little overly cautious when we were in these villages since the majority of the population was Hungarian. But when we went to spend the night in Košice, a big predominantly Slovak city in the East, I refused to try and speak Hungarian even though it's possible that some of them knew the language because of language prestige. I don't mean to simplify over a thousand years of history, but there are at times a lot of tensions between the two countries. Not that the people are enemies today, they just in general don't like each other. So here, I was, clearly in their territory. I wasn't about to address people in Hungarian because it could potentially have been viewed as a language of lower prestige and have a similar to reaction to someone speaking Russian, or at least English with a thick Russian accent, in the United States during the Cold War.

Clip from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Ultimately, to answer my question it seems that using the local language if you know it or a high prestige language, like English in most cases, is probably a safe bet. Unless I'm talking to you at a museum in Budapest, in which case please speak to me in Hungarian. Airplanes are kind of places of nowhere, so the same rules may not apply. As such, I think Emirates would be better off highlighting their ridiculous first class perks than their multilingual staff.