Obama’s Language Mandate: Why It Feels Like Hungarian to Me
I had a chance to visit Slovakia a couple of years ago, and found myself in the lovely Lake Bled area, staying at a five-star conference hotel. There were Italians, Germans, Israelis, Croats and yes, even Hungarians there. And do you know what language they uniformly used to communicate with the reception clerks, the waiters and cab drivers? Bingo. English. I even overheard a small group of businessmen leaving a meeting – all had heavy accents, but all had good command of English. This is the reality in Europe, and many other places too. A few years ago, my family was visiting the World Expo in Nagoya, Japan. Visitors from other Asian countries like China and South Korea were using English to get around! Didn’t hear much Spanish spoken.
BTW, I’d like to put in a plug for Hungarian – my own native tongue, though I don’t speak it as well as I would wish having emigrated to the U.S. at age 6. There are plenty of ethnic Hungarians living in Romania, Russia, Czech Republic, even Serbia, who have been forced to drop their native tongue out of expediency or political necessity, or both. A generation ago, Hungarian schoolchildren learned Russian and German as their second and third languages. Today, they study English — just like everyone else.
