Stop Trying to Make French Happen
Paris is fighting a losing battle over the prominence of their language.
When Dave Keating, the Brussels correspondent for France 24, posted a story link with the comment, “France is back on its quixotic quest to dislodge English as the EU’s common language, and replace it with French,” my natural reaction was to roll my eyes and mutter “There they go again.” The report itself, though, is less problematic.
POLITICO (“France sues Commission over primacy of English in EU hiring“):
The use of Euro-English and Globish, a simplified version of English used by non-native speakers, may have become widespread in the EU, but France has never given up hope of Brussels bureaucrats speaking French.
On the contrary, Paris is now attacking the bloc for hiring some new employees based on assessments conducted in English.
Brussels is currently hiring new officials in fields such as space, defense and economics, using a selection process involving some tests that are only given in English. Paris contends that those criteria favor anglophone candidates over their rivals, and has filed two complaints before the EU’s top court; one of them was made public on Monday.
For France, English-only tests amount to discrimination and violate the EU treaties. The bloc’s rules generally provide that all EU citizens should be treated equally, regardless of nationality. Rules on recruiting EU officials also ban language-based discrimination in general, and accept it only under certain conditions.
“It discriminates against non-anglophone candidates,” a French diplomat said on condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to speak on the matter publicly. They added this was not just a French fight, as other member states shared the same concern.
Another EU diplomat who was not authorized to speak publicly confirmed that Italy supported the French position and stressed that “this is not a position against a specific language but in favor of multilingualism.”
France’s push against the ubiquity of English echoes a domestic debate over the country’s loss of influence in the world. French President Emmanuel Macron has been working to boost the use of French worldwide, and on Monday reiterated the importance of la francophonie during a speech as he inaugurated the Cité international de la langue française, a new cultural center devoted to French in the castle of Villers-Cotterêts.
While I share World Politics Review editor Judah Grunstein‘s bemusement when he observes, “Does any other country ‘exalt’ its language, rather than just speak it?” they actually have a pretty good case here. Giving written exams only in English violates clear EU law, is demonstrably unfair to non-native speakers, and is just bad policy.
Their larger project, though, is doomed to fail:
Paris has lobbied extensively in favor of keeping French as a lingua franca within the EU; when it held the Council presidency in 2022, for example, it decided that all preparatory meetings and notes would be in French.
French is an official EU language (one of 24) and is informally considered one of the Commission’s three working languages (the others being English and German), as well as one of the Council’s two spoken languages.
While from a legal point of view, all of the bloc 24 languages are equal, in practice entrance exams are often available in French and German as well as in English.
With 3,271 of its nationals working at the Commission in 2023, France is the third most represented country in the bloc’s institutions after Italy and Belgium.
However, French nationals are underrepresented among the EU’s higher-ranking staff compared to Commission targets to ensure geographical balance among the bloc’s employees.
Like it or not, English has been the world’s—and certainly the West’s—default language for more than a century. As I’ve noted many times over the years, if English isn’t your first language, it’s almost always the case that English is the obvious choice when choosing a second language to learn. Conversely, if English is your first language, the second language is usually non-obvious.*
While I’ve learned German three separate times, my conversational proficiency in that language is terrible, as I haven’t had occasion to regularly practice it in 30 years.** Native German speakers, by comparison, regularly have occasion to speak English.
I took a Fulbright-sponsored month-long trip to Egypt in the summer of 2001. In Cairo, it seemed that everyone spoke English as a second language. While presumably an artifact of having been a British colony, there was also commercial incentive: most tourists were either native English speakers or had some English. When we went down to Luxor and other parts south, the huckers would initially approach me speaking German, presumably a function of both my appearance and the high concentration of German tourists. When that didn’t work, though, they immediately switched to English.
For reasons I don’t quite understand, the Brits have adjusted much better to the loss of their empire and global leadership than have the French. Partly, I suspect, it’s a function of the ascendance of the United States as an anglophone successor and the Special Relationship between our governments.
Regardless,French is never going to become a world language again. English has far and away the most speakers—with three quarters of them as a second language. That’s followed closely by Mandarin Chinese and distantly by Hindi and Spanish. French is a distant fifth. But there are more native English speakers that combinedFrench speakers.
______________
*In much of the United States, that’s increasingly less true, given the ubiquity of Spanish speakers.
**Strangely, my reading proficiency is considerably better—although by no means proficient—despite relatively little formal training and mostly picking it up from conversational immersion.
Maybe the French and Italians should improve their English education?
The fact is that English is everyone’s second language and this (if you are a Dane or Slovene) is more discriminatory than asking everyone (except the Irish) to speak a second language:
Perhaps things would have been different if the French hadn’t lost the Seven Years’ War, but here we are.
My son did a semester in Madrid and really wanted to get proficient in Spanish. He found it frustrating because ordinary folks weren’t patient enough to deal with his halting language ability and immediately started speaking to him in English. Probably needed to go to some rural location and live there.
I think the EU should just suck it up and pick a truly disgusting sounding official language like Flemish.
@Scott:
Yes, English has become the language of business and technology. When I was working for Siemens in Atlanta, they encouraged people to learn German and this was exactly my argument. I told my supervisor flat out there is no way I am ever going to learn German in an office where all the German natives speak English with, at worst, a German accent. They even sent me to Germany and it was pretty much the same thing … everyone spoke English at a conversational level and I was struggling with “Where is the bathroom”.
England left the EU, keeping English as the primary language is like keeping Latin, Mandarin or Navajo.
May I suggest replacing it with Gaelic?
@Gustopher: And for how long was Latin the lingua franca of Europe?
@Gustopher: Not really, it is one of the use languages of Ireland where in reality Gaelic is not actually used, Irish English is. Gaelic is a cultural pretence without real operational reality (this is not to express any hostility to Gaelic nor the pretence as it is understandable, but it is a pretence). The majority of the Irish Republic population are de facto Anglophone monolinguals.
@Barry:
I think Latin began to lose its status when Newton published Opticks in English in the early XVIII century.
The Western Roman Empire fell around 450 CE. The Eastern Roman Empire hung on until the 1500s, but their language was Greek rather than Latin. So, around 1200 years without any major political unit for which it was the native language. Far longer if it takes off when the Roman Republic seriously expands in the second century BCE.
That last date might be wrong. it’s after the third and final Punic War, and when they take over much of Greece and the Balkans.
English will no doubt decline in time and be replaced by something else.
Probably not French.
@Gustopher:
Only if you want to really annoy the Irish.
😉
(And some Scots)
I took 3 years of German in high school and never found a reason to exercise it. At a certain point my interests became focused on Latin America and I learned a fair amount of Spanish thru 2-3 week immersions in it, at least enough to navigate hitchhiking/bussing in Mexico.
My last trip down that way was in 2002 or 3 after which my parent’s health became such that I didn’t feel secure leaving town for more than a wkend and then I had to take custody of my sons. My life was not my own for the next 10 yrs or so and I’ve lost a fair amount of my pidgin Spanish since then (tho I still have enough to walk/ride around Mallorca w/o my wife).
Wo ist die orchesterprobe?
Thanks to a single year of 10th grade German, I remain, even now, prepared to find the orchestra practice in any German city.
French is a gendered language. How can that ever be acceptable in the new world of “my pronouns” and ephemeral gender identity?
@Gustopher:
How about Proto-Indo-European? That’s common to most European languages (except Basque and I think Finnish; maybe also Etruscan, but no one speaks that anymore).
Esperanto!
@JKB:
Hey bud,
That much obsession about someone else’s gender isn’t healthy. Who hurt you so much?
Hugs,
drj
@JKB:
The majority of European languages use grammatical gender.
Has absolutely nothing to do with sexuality.
Some languages include gender differentiation for “animate” vs “inanimate”, for instance.
This has not led, as far as I am aware, to a marked difference in the general preference of people for remaining in the “animate” category. 🙂
@Joe:
Bless you!
“This has not led, as far as I am aware, to a marked difference in the general preference of people for remaining in the “animate” category.”
You forget furries. Now that I know about these languages I will know who to blame when my grandkids are forced to use litterboxes at school.
Steve
BTW, French is the quasi-universal language of haute cuisine, is it not?
What more do they need?
@Joe:
You learn something new every day. For some reason I thought that Harry Harrison is the person who made up the language of Esperanto, since I had heard of this language in the course of my having read several Stainless Steel Rat books multiple times back in the day (ridiculously fun series of books). However, nope…it predates the Stainless Steel Rat books. Cool to know this.
One of the reasons China is not going to be the next global superpower is that no one outside of China speaks Chinese, and they don’t use the western alphabet. It severely constrains their soft power. English is like the US Dollar: it’s the global standard.
As for French, I was fluent back in the 60’s when I was a kid at Ecole Zola (school team: The Fighting Social Critics) in Rochefort, but like @James and German, it’s not easy to hold onto. Still have the accent, but a 10 year-olds vocabulary degraded by 60 years with only intermittent exposure leaves me capable of handling menu French, but not of discussing Voltaire.
@JohnSF: While “gender” in its original sense could refer to categories having nothing to do with biological sex, such as animacy, I’ve more recently seen those non-sex-related categories called “noun classes” rather than genders, to avoid confusion because so many Westerners are accustomed to grammatical gender only referring to categories such as masculine, feminine, and neuter. Even there, the assignation of gender is arbitrary when referring to non-persons, so that a word like “apple” can be masculine in one language and feminine in another. It doesn’t quite have nothing to do with sex, given that those same markings do generally align with sex when talking about people, but the link is weak.
I took Yiddish and Hebrew in elementary school. Somewhere I’ve piles of notebooks with these languages in my own handwriting, which I can make no sense of now. In two trips I took to Israel in the 80s, I got by mostly on English and some common Hebrew phrases.
Yiddish, as far as I know, is spoken by no one outside New York City 😉
I attribute the “loss” of these languages on a general indifference towards them, as well as lack of consistent practice and any need for them. And maybe also the general overall misery I felt through elementary school.
I can sound out written words, when they come with the vowel punctuation marks (whatever they’re called), and some common words without. But I won’t understand most of them.
I had a bit of an odd insight several days ago about how English speakers sometimes absolutely butcher foreign place names and sometimes we just use the local pronunciation. The pattern is bizarre.
We pronounce Paris with an ess at the end, but Marseilles and Nice and Toulouse, etc. with a batrardized French pronunciation which is pretty close to how locals would say it. How hard is it to say “pahree”? Why don’t we? If we can say “mahr say” we can say pahr ee. It’s not that hard.
Italian city names get anglicized butchered the most: Turin, Florence, Naples, Venice, even Rome. All of those are easy to say for most English speakers in pretty close to local pronunciation, but we normally use the anglicized version. How hard is it to say Napoli instead of Naples? It’s pretty bizarre.
Why?
Think about how Brits say jaguar. The car or the creature. They add an extra syllable for funsies, apparently. The best is if you hear an English person try to pronounce Nicaragua. That is insane! Ur doing it wrong! The same with tortilla and jalapeño.
It’s a foreign word: try to pronounce it the way locals do. It’s not that hard.
@Kathy: The reasons for the decline in Yiddish are complicated. It was certainly helped along by the Holocaust, which literally cut the worldwide Yiddish-speaking population in half. But the main reason is that there just was no longer any need for emancipated, assimilated Jews to speak it rather than the languages of whatever countries they were from.
The original Zionists might have made Yiddish the language of the state they were creating rather than reconstructed Hebrew (which wasn’t a vernacular at all between the late Biblical period and the 19th century–it was simply a literary and liturgical language like Latin following the collapse of the Roman Empire), but they had a strong desire to move beyond the shtetl. So in consequence, aside from very old people and a few scholars, the only people who still speak Yiddish are Hasidim in certain parts of New York and Israel, who practice voluntary separation from the outside world.
@Kylopod:
If you were to do a study of what people have sex with apples, are you quite certain you would not see differences with countries that have masculine and feminine apples?
@Kathy:
Four years of Spanish in HS. Two and a half years of French at university. I remember basically nothing useful except for the pronunciation rules which stuck like glue. Some nouns, mostly nouns Some really basic verb forms.
I got gigs in Sweden and Iceland because I had a cursory knowledge of extremely basic Swedish. I mostly knew swear words thanks to my great grandfather. Hey, that was better than most. I knew the software and they had someone on board who could give me detailed work direction in English
The annoying part was I watched Icelandic vids and language apps every night to improve my language skills and everyone there just spoke English to me to practice and improve their own conversational English. I wanted to improve, dammit! People were way too damn polite to let me flounder and grasp which is what I needed.
I wanted to immerse and was stymied at every turn. Everyone spoke English to me. It was frustrating!
I was working at a job in Stockholm and one of my colleagues told me after hours in a bar that I spoke Swedish like a drunken toddler. I thought that insight was hilarious and spot on. Most of the nouns were kind of correct, but I just butchered verbs and sentence construction.
I was trying.
@Gustopher:
Are there any documented incidents of folks who have tried to have sex with an apple? I know that folks have hollowed out apples to make bongs, but to actually penetrate the apple, that I am not so sure of.
On the other hand, we do have at least one documented case of a red blooded American male trying to have sex with an apple pie, which I guess could still count as a male having sex with an apple, thereby making the apple feminine vs male?
Of course, this incident took place in the documentary that is called American Pie, I kid, I kid, I know it is a comedy and not a factual look at how horny teens behave in America. Again, I will still count this incident because the film makers did too good of a job of making it look like that apple pie was violated by Jason Biggs.
Regarding language, with me the less said the better. My Dad had an aptitude for language, although he never spoke a foreign language around us kids, but the military was aware he had a knack for things like being able to correctly speak Castilion Spanish, etc., but he did not pursue, the military was also aware he had a knack for working with computers, so it was a gun in his hand during the Vietnam war or off he went to Nato/Turkey to put his computer and language skills to good use, and of course he also had the opportunity to meet my mother.
Back to me, Italian mother, French cousins/family members, and I lived in the Latino district of Southern CA until I was 28, and yet I never could pass Spanish and did not learn Italian.
My mom fixed that mistake with my sister’s kid and she is straight up bi-lingual and speaks Italian as well as a native speaker (and I think Italian citizens have complimented her on her proficiency in the Italian language).
@de stijl: Because “Par-is” is phonetic and “Marr-see-ill-ess” isn’t?
More importantly, a Joni Mitchell song called Free Man in Pahree would just be wrong!
@de stijl: I would imagine speakers of all languages import foreign words in ways that fit their natural speaking patterns. I’m perfectly capable of pronouncing Deutschland, München, and Köln but nonetheless say Germany, Munich, and Cologne. I’m pretty sure Germans and Frenchmen do the same with the United States and our cities.
Hell, for that matter, we pronounce Birmingham, Alabama differently than Birmingham, England.
When I was in Sweden and Iceland I really wanted to immerse myself not just linguistically, but culturally. My forebears were from here, and I wanted to explore that. I was going to be here for at least six months, so dive in and explore.
In Iceland, I was based in Reykjavik, but wanted to explore the hinterlands. That was fast and kind of easy. Drive an hour in any direction. The hard part was renting the car.
Outback Iceland is brutally beautiful and stunning and stark. I was essentially perpetually gob smacked. I stared in slack jawed wonder. The horizon kept me a bit steadied. It looks a bit like eastern Montana on steroids once you are away from the coast only there is a dormant volcano on the horizon. Endless stark vistas. It hammers you. Big north Atlantic weather systems roll through unexpectedly. I have never experienced a gray, cloudy day like that in the US. It is spooky. It’s so empty it messes with your brain.
Rural inland southern Sweden looks remarkably like northern Minnesota, which I had already seen. I wasn’t unimpressed, but it was muted. This looks like Bemidji or Ely with smaller lakes.
@Kathy:
And ballet.
@James Joyner: On the topic of Hebrew and Yiddish, one thing I’ve noticed over the years involves the selective mockery over the consonant-sound found in words like Chanukah and Chutzpah. If you use a simple h-sound, that’s considered “correct,” but if you use the “tsh” sound found in words like chill or cherry or even the Yiddish tchotchke, game over. When Smokey Robinson wished someone a happy “tsha-NOO-kuh” a few years ago, they made an entire SNL skit about it.
Yet “Hanukkah” isn’t an exact representation of how it’s pronounced in Hebrew, either. It’s that throaty sound that doesn’t exist in English. And I can think of at least one English word of Hebrew origin where the “tsh” sound has been standardized for English speakers–cherub. I guess because that word was brought into English by Bible scholars several centuries ago, the translators just didn’t care as much about representing how a word sounded like in the source language as they do today. If cherub had entered English in the 20th century, it would probably be pronounced “heruv” or “keruv,” and it might even be spelled that way, too.
@Kylopod:
My grandparents spoke Yiddish, but they all came from eastern Europe, their children learned it at home, but their grandchildren, including me, did so in school. At home we didn’t use Yiddish to any meaningful extent. Some holiday names, some words here and there, some swear words, that kind of thing.
The way to gain fluency in a language is practice. I did that with English. In a way, I still do. But English is easy. It’s the global lingua franca, as noted. Beyond that, finding a movie in English is about as hard as finding salt in the ocean. Add my interest in science and science fiction, and English is pretty much the native tongue of those two fields.
@de stijl: I have run into a couple of different Brits speaking perfectly fluent Spanish with an over-the-top English accent. It’s like they are comically deaf to the local accent and can only read the words as if they were reading a sign in Central London.
On the flip side of this, how did the Spanish come to call London “Londres”? I was so confused when the customs guy in Madrid asked me if I had come from Londres.
@de stijl:
Which locals then. I suppose you shall privilége the métropole
But which local Paris in official French, or regional French, as normande, provençale etc
Not so simple as you think.
In any case the English form is likely the frozen Norman French form, as continental French only dropped the final consonant. So you are in usual English pronouncing an old French pronunciation.
By such standard you shall need to track the regional évolution of the accent
In any case, not being myself a self torturing monolingual over compensating, in Arabic zi say Bariis, in French I say Pari, in English I say Paris and Spanish I bastardise… Algiers in English, Dzair in derridja, Alger in French, each is right.
While Macron dors have to play Don Quixote for national reasons, it’s less silly than the Galicians calling for their language to be officialised.
Meanwhile I enforce French in my company as its just inefficient for me to have Anglo monolingual unable to deal with the French, while the Francophones usually are perfectly acceptable in English. Strange though that both francophones and hispanophones decide to pass to English between each other.
@Joe: presumably intermediation via French during the long centuries where French was the language of the Crown and the English King held as féodal lord the now French provinces abutting Castille and Aragone
@Joe: presumably intermediation via French during the long centuries where French was the language of the Crown and the English King held aa féodal lord the now French provinces abutting Castille and Aragone
@de stijl:
Try to get an English speaker to correctly pronounce Ypres.
BTW, I’ve no idea how that’s pronounced. Just that it’s not “wipers.”
It’s a losing battle. Place names differ among languages for various reasons. At best you can give an old place a new name, and often that will get people to change to it more or less universally, or at least adopt the same spelling, like Beijing. But that failed with however one pronounces the name of the country formerly known as Turkey.
And that’s before you get into odd spellings with letters that don’t exist in all languages, like many place names in Norway.
@James Joyner:
I don ‘t (except for the “Alabama” and “England” part, of course–they’re 2 different words). Then again, I speak mostly American and am not familiar enough with how people from Birmingham, England pronounce words and so pronounce both the same.
I love languages, and the fact that many are in danger of disappearing seems quite wrong. My love of languages comes from my father who spoke Yiddish, Hebrew, Polish, Russian, German and oh yeah English quite well. I can get along in Yiddish, German (after all it is derived from Yiddish), Spanish, and a little French. In English I have a Midwest accent. I applaud those who try to preserve languages such as Germans who have Plattdeutsch speaking clubs. I love the idiosyncrasies and oddities of every language. I am amused that the “new” in place names becomes “Nueva” in Spanish. I like the words that three year olds make up. It is all a part-no the heart- of humanity’s poetry.
Hey, is the French pronunciation of Lourdes better than the Spanish one?
@Just nutha ignint cracker: The British original is BURR-ming-um and the Alabama version is burr-ming-HAM. I suspect most people pronounce them the same but the fact that we named a city after a ;pmh-established one in the same language and still pronounce it differently is interesting to me. I’m sure there are many examples just of that.
@James Joyner:
Some locals have always called the UK Birmingham Brummagem.
From the alternative proper name of the town, Bromwicham.
Hence the nickname “Brummies” for the people and “Brum” for the city.
So now you know. 😉
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Ever watched Peaky Blinders?
That’s (largely) set in Brum, and the accents are pretty authentic.
@Kathy: At least three of my grandparents could speak Yiddish, but they usually didn’t. My maternal grandmother grew up speaking Polish and didn’t learn Yiddish until later, and while my grandfather was a native Yiddish speaker (he sounded like someone who wouldn’t have been out of place in Eddie Murphy’s barbershop), because of his wife and her family, the main language they spoke was Polish. My paternal grandfather was American-born, but he could speak Yiddish, though I rarely heard him do so.
@JohnSF: Don’t have satellite TV, not a PBS guy either, so if it’s from the UK I’ve probably not watched it. (Particularly if it’s a comedy show. I don’t get British humor–or lack thereof, depending…)
@Scott:
My best opportunities to practice my French have all involved colonials — people from Haiti or Cote d’Ivoire or Quebec. The first two have less English than I have French, and the Quebecois are happy to avoid English.
In France, it’s rare that my French is better than their English. My greatest bilingual accomplishments were purchasing a cell phone in Paris and brokering a purchase for a Japanese tourist in a cheese shop in St. Jean de Luz, where the proprietor only spoke Basque and French.
@Joe:
Ĉu vi parolas Esperanto?
@Kathy:
Say “eep” and then swallow your tongue while breathing out. Voiced.
That terminal French uvular ‘r’ gets eradicated as quickly as possible in borrowed words and names, which is why “hors d’oeuvre” and “Brett Favre” reverse the r and the v into something anglophones can deal with.
Well I’m somewhat thankful that I’m chipping in late having a read everything, I am reminded of two adventures. One, the discovery that my junior high school during teacher was in fact teaching us the Berlin dialect (which provided some hysterically funny interaction with people outside of metropolitan Berlin), and an interaction with a swedish speaking instructor in college who was appalled at the Swedish I had learned at my grandmother’s knee. Similarly, I have friends who are veterans of the Southeast Asian war games who swear fluently in Vietnamese and Laotian, but refuse to admit any other knowledge of those languages
I took 4 years of German, and used to know Mexican peassnt (farm worker, Northern Mexico) Spanish.
I lived in Iceland for 2 years around 2000 (before it failed (Kreppa (sickness, flu in 2009)), then became tourist central back when the Blue Lagoon was a power plant effluent pool and cheap). I worked hard on the unique sounds in Íslensk (the click “LL” is only also in Xhosa in Africa, out of the side of the mouth) so I could be understood as they were not used to their language with an accent (a couple of dialects, but mostly B-P-F shifts). I was never good at the umlaut O (sounds like you are puking, nothing like German umlaut O). I figured out the aspirations (hissing afer H and R, and other odd times, like the SK in Íslensk). I can do the inhaled exclamatory Já (also in Norwegian) without burping afterwards.
I really can’t read it anymore, never could speak well (crazy grammar with declined nouns, 28 forms of Hestur (horse)- cough, English is about 12). Back in 2010 I was helping translate Icelandic reports at a 3rd grade level when Ejya Mountain Glacier (volcano) erupted – and I was laughing at the reporters trying to pronounce it -Eyja volcano was all they had to say . I knew Earth Kitchen = volcano. There was zero “google translate” of Icelandic then and I had my paper Ensk (English) – Íslenskur vatnaoðabók
As for Swedish – has a guy from Sweden come visit for work and he confided, “I can’t understand a thing they are saying.” Meanwhile I took a work trip to Bavaria for a month and they though I was Swedish (not American English because of my sort-of Icelandic pronunciation) – and also I had zero comprehension of Bayerisch.
And then there is Flemish (Vlem). On a work trip to Belgium I realized I had a 70% comprehension level watching the local news (vice 10% in the Amsterdam dialect). I was huh, I’m understanding this.
Yiddish – used to hear it on Wiltshire Blvd in Los Angeles. It has gone the way of Ladino.
@JohnSF:
LOL. It’s crime drama, (very) loosely based on some real life events.
“Peaky Blinders” being the name of the gang; they were known for their little trick of stitching razor blades into their cap peaks.
TBH honest, I’ve never watched a whole episode of it myself, but I’ve caught excerpts, and the accents are either correct or close enough.
As an alternative, try googling “Birmingham accent” and look for a video result.
You may be amused.
@Michael Reynolds: “One of the reasons China is not going to be the next global superpower is that no one outside of China speaks Chinese, and they don’t use the western alphabet.”
Also, it’s really fucking hard to learn, at least as an adult.
@Kathy: “Yiddish, as far as I know, is spoken by no one outside New York City ”
And the entertainment industry!
I learned the vast majority of my Yiddish from Michael Gleason, creator of Remington Steele and a man descended directly from the Old Sod, not the old country…
At different times in my life, I’ve been conversant (if not fluent) in Spanish, French, and German, with some ability to get by in Italian and Russian. Nowadays, my brain sometimes scrambles foreign words into something that bears no resemblance to real speech.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Dammit, reply fail. LOL.
It’s crime drama, (very) loosely based on some real life events.
“Peaky Blinders” being the name of the gang; they were known for their little trick of stitching razor blades into their cap peaks.
TBH honest, I’ve never watched a whole episode of it myself, but I’ve caught excerpts, and the accents are either correct or close enough.
As an alternative, try googling “Birmingham accent” and look for a video result.
You may be amused.
@DrDaveT:
No(n).