Language policy in migrant-receiving countries is a ticklish matter
By R.L.G. | BERLIN
“DEUTSCH oder Englisch?” the gruff middle-aged man behind the counter at the driving-licence authority asked, after a look at my passport. Your columnist had to take the German driving-licence exam; my previous licence (from New York state) is not recognised in Germany. The German test includes questions like: “Where are you allowed to park a trailer with a permissible total mass exceeding 2 tonnes in built-up areas regularly on Sundays and public holidays and between 10pm and 6am?” (An actual question.) One can take the test in various foreign languages. Johnson is not comfortable with many driving-related vocabulary items like “servo-assisted steering” in German, so English it was.
The next test-taker came in, a teenager, and the man asked him “Deutsch oder Türkisch?” All of the ears in the room pricked up. “I grew up in Germany,” the teen replied in unaccented German. “You have a Turkish passport,” the man said neutrally. “But I grew up in Germany,” the young man said again. The test administrator insisted there was no insult in his question.
Should he have known better? There are hundreds of thousands of people of Turkish descent in Berlin; many have been here for decades, and many were born here, with little connection to Turkey aside from a passport. Germany has loosened the old laws that used to require German blood for German citizenship. But getting German citizenship can still be difficult, and double citizenship is usually impossible. (German-born Mesut Özil, pictured, gave up his Turkish citizenship in 2007 so he could play football for Germany.) Young people like the teen taking the driving-licence test are usually not only fluent in German; they often speak no Turkish.
The German man giving the exam could well feel that Germany was generous in offering its national driving-licence exam in so many languages. He clearly felt he was being polite in offering the Turkish language to the holder of a Turkish passport. But the young man had every reason to be prickly too. His passport and dark hair might have said Turkish, but his clothes and his language could not have been much more Berlin. He was hardly an elderly lady in a headscarf, and his passport is not his fault. It is well known that getting a German passport is even harder than getting a driving licence.
It’s not easy being multilingual, Johnson noted recently in the context of Ukraine. This goes for states with ancient linguistic minorities, but it also goes for those made multilingual by recent migration. Attractive rich economies will attract migrants from poorer countries—and this is to the benefit of the receiving country, whatever xenophobes and tabloids might say.
But migration does create ticklish issues. Best known is the common problem of what services to offer in what foreign language—the German driving-licence test can be taken in 11 languages besides German. Why not fewer? Why not more? These problems are obvious ones. More subtle are problems like the one I witnessed: how to know when an offer of a service in a foreign language will be treated as an insult rather than a migrant-friendly kindness?
Berlin is changing quickly, and some people do not like that fact. This is an old story—gentrification—and a new one, the rapid internationalisation of the German capital. Johnson’s wife, talking on her mobile while walking down the street recently, was yelled at: “Speak German!” Shouting at foreigners for speaking a foreign language isn’t very good Gastfreundlichkeit.
But it can be off-putting to address someone in their native foreign language when they speak the national language perfectly well. Visitors to Denmark or the Netherlands frequently have their passable but accented Dutch or Danish answered in fluent English by well-meaning natives who forget that this can be taken as a mild slight. The slight can be even greater when it follows from the speaker's appearance or passport. That Germans have to tiptoe around this in their own capital might rankle. But learning to deal with it is a small price for living in one of the most dynamic and internationally attractive cities in the world.
