It’s more common now to hear people making disgusting remarks to others. One remark that has been bothering me for a very long while is the old “You’re in America, speak English.” I don’t think I need to explain why this is such a rude and disgusting remark to make to someone. Even to someone who is only visiting America. More videos have shown up of xenophobic Americans who seem to forget that America has no official language and America was founded from multiple countries and cultures. Many of which had their own language. Big surprise, right?

There are families that live in America, who are American citizens, which speak a different language at home than they do outside the home. If this whole family unit goes out and happens to speak their language around one of these “English is the only language in America” people, can you just imagine how annoyed the family would be? Can you imagine how people around them would see this guy?

This extends beyond spoken language. People are so afraid of the written Arabic language that they will mix it up with something entirely unrelated. I read of a story of a woman on an airplane who freaked out because the guy next to her was writing in Arabic. Well, on closer inspection, this writing was only just calculus equations. Okay, then.

Foreign languages should be something to be learned, not feared. Foreign languages are part of a country’s culture and a casual visitor should experience it and make an effort to learn it to communicate. But, it doesn’t mean that while you are in a foreign country, you should be able to fluently speak their language. You should experience it and learn what few words you can. Or, make an effort to learn the language on your own time simply because you want to. I have a goal of learning Japanese, simply because I want to.

When I went on my People to People Student Ambassador Program in 2012, I visited Spain, France, and Italy. Not in one place did some native of the country tell me “You’re in Spain, speak Spanish!” or any of the others. No one will ever tell you that in a foreign country. Actually, they’ll be pretty pleased to help you learn some words. This one exercise I had to do in Italy was to order gelato in Italian. They taught us how to structure the sentence and left blanks for us to replace with our preferred flavors. The lady scooping our gelato was incredibly patient and she seemed to like waiting for us to order in Italian. I don’t remember how to order gelato in Italian, but I can assure you that anyone from a foreign country would love to share their language, but would never force you to learn it if you are in their country.

Some people, in explaining why they feel that foreign language speakers living in America should speak English (and not their native language), say that foreign language speakers are lazy and don’t want to learn English. For one, we have the perspective that English is easy because it is our first language. We learned it growing up. These people did not. English is an extremely hard language to learn. You’ll only gain this knowledge by talking to someone who’s learned it as their second language. Even now, my roommate asks me grammar questions that puzzle me and I have no answer to. Second, you cannot learn a language overnight. It takes years of learning, patience, and practice to be able to fluently speak a language, especially one as complex as English. Third, I don’t think foreign language speakers in America are lazy. There might not be the resources available for them to learn the language. There may not be English classes. There may not be enough money to buy a book or a language learning device for English. They may want to learn the language, but there might be some things that hold them back or brick a wall up in their way.

So next time you hear someone speaking another language and it instantly makes you incredibly angry because this is America, everyone needs to speak English, calm down. Don’t speak because you don’t know the circumstances in their lives that are out of your control. Shut your mouth because you don’t have the right to speak. America does not have a national language because we are a mixing pot of many cultures and languages. Don’t be jerk to someone you don’t know simply because you hate the idea of someone speaking something other than English in America.