"Nearly-Fluent" & "Not Wholly Bilingual"

From Scouse to Spanish with footballer Trent Alexander-Arnold, measuring bilingualism & on who is praised for being multilingual & who is criticised

If you are a football fan or follow sports media, you may have heard the buzz around Trent Alexander-Arnold’s Spanish speech last week as he joined his new club, Real Madrid. If not, all you need to know is this: Alexander-Arnold is English, born and raised in Liverpool. He joined the Liverpool academy when he was only six years old and became one of their stars, playing for the team for the past nine years. He is considered one of the best right-backs in football. Much to the dismay of Liverpool fans, earlier this year, Alexander-Arnold signed with Real Madrid . Last week, at a ceremony in Spain welcoming the player, he came up on stage and much to the astonishment of, well, almost everyone, Alexander-Arnold did a short speech in… only Spanish. The internet and sports media went crazy with headlines about his apparently newfound (or not?) bilingualism!

The interpreter and commentator on one of the sports channels were both momentarily stunned into silence, expressing a “Wow, I did not expect this” and “Impressive!” after interpreting the player’s Spanish into English. One commented how this move to Real Madrid must have been some time in the making if Alexander-Arnold knew how to speak “very good Spanish” already. Others, especially Liverpool fans, were wondering the same thing: whether Alexander-Arnold’s departure from Liverpool had not been decided a lot earlier than he let on, and he had been learning the language for some time. I will leave that for the football media and Liverpool fans to discuss, but let’s talk about the language.

After the conference, I searched online how different media outlets were sharing the story and here are a few ways Alexander-Arnold’s Spanish was described:

‘Trent’ brings fluency and ‘impeccable’ Spanish to grand Real Madrid unveiling”

“impressive Spanish”

“remarkably-fluent Spanish”

“genuinely good Spanish, accent and all”

“Suspiciously good”

“polished Spanish”

And my favourite: “nearly-fluent Spanish”

Before diving into “nearly-fluent” and some of the other ways the player’s Spanish was described, I want to mention Alexander-Arnold’s (impeccable) Scouse! You can listen to it here, where he discusses his pride around being a Scouser, meaning someone from Liverpool for my readers who are not familiar with the term; Scouse is the English variety predominantly used in that area of England. Alexander-Arnold has been in the media for something language-related before. A quick search picked up this Metro article from 2020 about how he praised his teammate Takumi Minamino for learning English, and noted that the Japanese footballer had a hard time understanding the Scouse English variety when he first came to Liverpool.

As for the Spanish, was Alexander-Arnold’s speech impressive? Of course. He was articulate, confident and appeared to have put in a lot of effort into learning the language and pronunciation - never an easy feat as an adult learning an additional language. When did he start learning Spanish? We will likely never know as there is too much football-transfer drama related to him identifying a timeline, even though he could have also been learning Spanish for some time simply for the sake of learning another language! Football is a great place to explore multilingualism because players move clubs, often internationally and stay in one place for a while so learning the societal language is important, as is understanding one another as a team, and understanding the coaching staff. There are many footballers who are polyglots, meaning they know four or more languages.

But when we praise someone for their multilingualism or learning a new language, we should also keep in mind how others are criticised, especially with everything happening in the world right now. Why are children of heritage language speakers and their families told to speak English because “it is America”, or “this is Canada”, or “you are in the UK”? Why is the Spanish, or any other language used by immigrants, so rarely identified as “impeccable” or “polished” as they navigate potential language loss of their first language in a new country, while simultaneously learning a societal language? Why are immigrants told that unless they learn English, they will not be allowed somewhere, rather than encouraging both heritage language(s) and societal ones. We know from research this is a much better way to encourage language-learning in a new country.

A recent survey in the U.S. by Immigration Research Initiative showed that due to anti-immigration rhetoric, not surprisingly, Spanish-speaking immigrants fear using the language in public places: “People have looked at my son and me badly for speaking Spanish in public places, as if we were strange creatures.” And this is not unique to the U.S. and happens all over the world, with many different languages, depending on the prestige of a language and most often, what a person looks like.

None of this is meant to take away from a footballer’s linguistic achievement, because that too is important for children to hear and appreciate that language-learning is amazing and worthy of their time and effort. Alexander-Arnold has learnt one of the languages of the country where he will be spending a lot of time, and that itself is a sign of recognition and appreciation for multilingualism and a push-back against (English) monolingual ideologies. But, it is always worth remembering, linguistic diversity never equals linguistic equality.

I also can’t shake the “nearly-fluent” label. As I have said before and I am sure will a thousand times in my lifetime, who decides fluency? The answer is no one! It is also a form of language policing. Or, “genuinely-good Spanish” - what is the opposite? Yes, there are proficiency tests, but there is no standard of what is and is not fluent. It varies because language varies. Language is fluid, complex, it changes continuously and rapidly. People use different languages in different domains, another reason the idea of “balanced bilingualism” is never straightforward.

Also this week and related, I finished a book I will maybe talk about at length in another newsletter as it deals with endangered languages and intergenerational trauma but for now, I wanted to point out something that has to do with this idea of “nearly-fluent”, only worded in a different way. In the first few pages of the book, the author laments not being able to pass on her heritage language to her child, one she is not fluent in but grew up hearing, a language that is endangered. She writes in the book that it is because she is, “not wholly bilingual”.

In both “nearly-fluent” and “not wholly bilingual”, we are encouraged, ever so subtly, to identify a gap, an unattained level, a sliver of dead space in between what someone knows, and doesn’t in one language. Again, how is this measured? And who measures it? When something is not whole, or is “nearly” there, we do not identify the complexity, the part(s) that are present, but instead, our focus is on what is missing. It is as if there is a magical resolution, one last piece in a puzzle that will complete it, and the skies will open up and angels will sing: “Fluency has been achieved!”. It is a hard way to live, and an impossible way to think about language. No one benefits.

And in case you need a tiny bit of hope, multilingualism is resistance.