When I came to UK to study for my master degree, I spent a few months in a language centre in Manchester. There were people from virtually everywhere, and I quickly noticed that their attitudes to the use of English were slightly different from each other. I and my Japanese friends had a sort of agreement that we would never use Japanese in or out of classes, to make sure we completely immersed ourselves in the English-speaking environment. At first I thought it was a bit strange and rather pointless, because our accents were so strong that we still sounded much more like Japanese than English.
On the other hand, students from some other countries in the centre did not seem to be against using speaking their native languages even when there were people who did not speak them. I was OK with that, but later I was told that some of them were actually openly abusing me everytime when I was having breakfast with them in our student accomodation. Although it was quite shocking, I let them carry on because if they didn’t do so in front of me, they would still have done that elsewhere.
Several years passed and now I live in Cambridge, which has a large population of Japanese researchers. I normally talk to them in Japanese when we go out together, but I do speak in English when non-Japanese speakers are coming with us. Nevertheless, some locals don’t like that and occationally they verbally (or even physically) attack us saying things like “speak English!”.
Experiences like these make me think if I should have a certain rule on how we use our native languages in my lab. In her book “At The Helm”, Kathy Barker suggests lab members should only use English in the lab and perhaps many people agree with her. However, it would be quite unrealistic to do so if you have a lab which is located in Japan and has, say, 8 Japanese and 3 British. Besides, using the same language does not necessarily help because those with poorer English proficiency can easily be left out of conversation. My feeling is that we should respect the fact that people from different countries have communication barriers which cannot be overcome by simply speaking the same language. Breaking such barrieres will probably need conscious efforts from lab members as well as from the P.I..I would appreciate comments from anyone who are conducting such efforts, but in the meantime, I shall stick to, eh, Japanese in my Japanese-only lab…
I worked in a Dutch lab for four years, only one of two non-Dutch natives in the group. They all spoke great English, of course, but not for casual banter. Eventually I was driven to take classes and learn the language precisely because I wanted to be in on the gossip. Years of study resulted in me becoming fairly fluent in Dutch, but it didn’t bring me any closer to feeling as if I ‘belonged’ in any way, shape or form. Not even close. In many ways it was worse, because then I didn’t have the excuse of language to explain why there always seemed to be a wall between me and the natives.
I worked in a Dutch lab where we actually did switch to English (I’m Dutch) even for casual chatting whenever one of the non-Dutch people was in the room, and often forgot to switch back to Dutch after they left.
I also worked in a lab in Quebec City, and thought my French would be okay, but I hadn’t accounted for the accent, and people could understand ME, but I didn’t understand THEM. There were two girls form France who translated things to regular French for me. My supervisor spoke perfect English, so I talked about research in English.
Now I’m a lab in Toronto where the majority of people are not a native English speaker, but everyone speaks English all day, of course. However, sometimes people will speak Chinese in the lunch room (Mandarin, I think, although my ears can’t distinguish it from Cantonese) and it makes everyone else feel left out. They are speaking about research things, even, because the conversation will be sprinkled with technical terms. My supervisor has told them to not speak Chinese in the lab, but she isn’t around to check, and besides, that doesn’t cover lunchroom/break conversations.
Our most important rule is that everyone should write their lab books in English, no matter how bad your English is. Previous lab mates have done them in Russian or French, assuming that they would be the only ones to read it anyway, but after they leave nobody can read what they did.