Why do people who don't speak English go on vacations to countries whose language they don't know?

[Zoetstofzoetje]

English is the lingua franca nowadays, French used to be the lingua Franca here, but since the 1970s educated people are expected to know English, not French.

La Francophonie est mort, long live the English language!

[Zoetstofzoetje]

I don't understand why Quebeckers and Frenchmen would pretend not to know English. That just strikes me as stupid.

According to my Quebecois lady friend, it´s because they felt as if they were considered as second-rate citizens (not-speaking-English) in their own country, so they became snub about it. Same happened (similar outcome anyway) in Spain in the outer provinces - the dictator decided to ban all dialects. Remember kids, the difference between a dialect and a language is an army and a navy. Anyways, when the dictator handed over power to the king, the local become extra stubborn about not being and speaking Spanish - but instead belonging to the dialect group.

[Aeson]

He sounds a bit French, therefore, what does he know?

Louis L'amour was the manliest red-blooded gun-totting American writer who ever walked the earth

Removing Louis and his adopted brother John from school, they headed south in the winter of 1923. Over the next seven or eight years, they skinned cattle in west Texas, baled hay in the Pecos Valley of New Mexico, worked in the mines of Arizona, California and Nevada, and in the saw mills and lumber camps of the Pacific Northwest. It was in colorful places like these that Louis met a wide variety of people, upon whom he later modeled the characters in his novels, many of them actual Old West personalities who had survived into the nineteen-twenties and -thirties.

Making his way as a mine assessment worker, professional boxer and merchant seaman, Louis traveled the country and the world, sometimes with his family, sometimes not. He visited all of the western states plus England, Japan, China, Borneo, the Dutch East Indies, Arabia, Egypt, and Panama, finally moving with his parents to Oklahoma in the early 1930s. There, he changed his name to Louis L’Amour and settled down to try and make something of himself as a writer.

[Fake Boris]

I witnessed many frenchmen pretending not to know English the last time I was in France. Once my companion would speak to them in Italian and make them comfortable, they mysteriously would understand my english.

I had not noticed this, YMMV.

[Fake Boris]

It's not pride, it's idiotic. Languages exist for communication. Failing to communicate is failure, not cultural identity.

"Failure to communicate" is actually a specialty of American tourists. Learn some phrases.

[rah]

While my experience proves nothing, it was similar to a few other stories my friends had related to me.

[rah]

I do know some Spanish, but not much of it was useful on my last trip. My accent sucks, and I needed more useful phrases than "where is the library"

[MOBIUS]

Is that what they call the knocking shops in Mexico these days...?

[Hauldren Collider]

"Failure to communicate" is actually a specialty of American tourists. Learn some phrases.

If you know English, and refuse to communicate in it out of pride, that's stupidity.

[Fake Boris]

I wouldn't expect you to understand cultural specificities.

[Aeson]

I know pig-latin and yet I won't acknowledge what someone says in the language.

[Aeson]

Same with Morse code.

[Aeson]

Though sometimes I do swear at other drivers in Morse code using my high-beams...

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

-.. --- / .--. . --- .--. .-.. . / --- ..-. - . -. / .- -.. -.. .-. . ... ... / -.-- --- ..- / .. -. / -- --- .-. ... .?

[Hauldren Collider]

I wouldn't expect you to understand cultural specificities.

There are lots of deeply "cultural" things that are also incredibly stupid, and I'm not going to hold back my criticism of them because they are "cultural".