She doesn't speak English - pointless meeting up

I actually messaged my brother just to clarify which language it would be best for me to pick up a few phrases in before meeting, this was his reply.

French or Italian probs if you want to make the effort but don’t stress her English is fine for light conversation. She’s shy tho so might prefer me to translate, don’t take it personally tho as she’s just nervous that her English sucks and that she won’t understand mam and dads heavy accents. But yeah a little French or Italian would be nice (my Italian is crap tho so don’t expect me to help if you take that route).

In OP's defence, it is extremely unusual and strange for someone to know three languages but none of it being English. Without giving away identifying details, my work involves a lot of languages and identifying the degrees of fluency. One thing that many, many people tend to lie about is how many languages they can speak.

When someone claims to speak "3 languages", it's usually just one language and they only have very basic or no skills in the other two. Language bragging is particularly common in people with lower education levels but who still want to impress others. They tell everyone they speak several languages because they know you cannot verify if that's true.

True trilingualism in the sense of being able to fluently speak, understand read, write and think in three languages is vanishingly rare. It requires a high level of academics and (usually) some sort of international background. As a result, one of those languages is invariably English as that's the most common denominator across the world. Before anyone gets triggered by the paragraph below, YES there are loads of people in the world who can speak 3 languages truly fluently but over 90% of them have English as one of the three.

So in this case, it's probably YABU not to meet a potential close relative due to communication problems but YANBU to question why she told your brother she "speaks" 3 languages but is in no hurry to learn English. That is a genuine red flag. Based on experience, many people who claim they speak 3 or more languages are simply lying about it impress others or to embellish their CV. It would make you question what other things the are faking about themselves to make themselves appear better.

Lots of people are berating OP here because they immediately believe the fact that this SIL can speak 3 languages. I would say you need to question that first. OP, if your family has never met this girl and you only have what your BIL told you about her, you need to dig a bit deeper to see if she really can do all the things she claims. We don't know more about her family or work background, so maybe there are unique factors that make sense. However simply going from a statistical perspective, it does not sound very plausible.

Might have missed some posts but it sounds like she grew up in Western Europe? English is always the second language taught in schools across Europe so something in her story doesn't add up.

There are many reasons a first conversation with a fiancé may be awkward other than a language barrier. People might be nervous, have preconceived notions, carry family baggage that had nothing to do with the situation, or in my case, simply be autistic, this person is going to be part of your family. This is just one meeting and does not define your entire relationship. Yet, it must happen for the relationship to start and grow.

refusing to meet will define your entire relationship and it won’t be positive.

Can you expand on how it worked? I feel like the conversation is going to be very stunted as my brother will have to translate everything in both directions.

Nowhere is 100% monocultural of course. But it's weird that some people think that the whole of the north is basically Bradford!

Can you expand on how it worked? I feel like the conversation is going to be very stunted as my brother will have to translate everything in both directions.

I know you're not sleeping me, but how about Harrogate? Skipton? Whitby? I could go on...

Many small tpwns have 0.1% of foreign born. It shouldn't be a surprise. Immigrant always first moved where jobs were aka bigher cities with industries

Right. Which towns are these?

After posting above, I was interested enough to have a quick Google. Apparently the North East of England has the fewest immigrants in the UK (by quite a long way).

Right. Which towns are these?

Some are though. DH is from Northumberland and the towns nearest to his village have very few people that are obviously from ethnic minorities.

The main reason is lack of work opportunities.

There are some very odd posts on this thread.

Lots of northern towns are largely monocultural. They aren't all Lancashire mill towns that now have large non-white populations.

And it's entirely possible for someone to speak three languages fluently and not English. I could for example easily imagine someone Spanish speaking Catalan and Italian alongside Castilian but not English.

It's strange that a Northern town is so mono cultural. There's usually minority groups living in them.