people talking their 1st language at work.

[ghostspirit]

im not going to say anything although sometimes i want to. because i think its rude. there are people at work that can speak English well. but they talk in their 1st language. im sometimes the only one in the room who does not understand. and it makes me feel quite isolated.

"He's round there now"
"Go round there now"

< still makes me laugh >

You had to be there at the time ....

i have tried to make convo a couple of times. like the time i was walking to work and bumped into one of them on the street that work is. i said a good few pages back. where another worker caught up and they stopped talking in english so i was pushed out again.

some of them are quite snappy as well. over really silly things sometimes its like they are looking for an argument. one example one of them wanted me to help put the plates away. so said ghost can you help so i did. and then she carried on and on 'im not wrong am i she should be helping we have all this to do. she should help. im not wrong im not wrong she should help. all said in an i want an argument tone.

To day i picked up a pink cloth that was not being used. and another worker wanted to know why i had the cloth what i was doing with it. where am i going with it. its a poxy cloth.

Conversation ceases as she walks past, nudging, winking, then talking while at the same time staring at cousin. You must know the kind of thing. please don't imply its not happening. It happens to others that work there, its been reported. totally unacceptable.

I don't live in Wales, but I go to Welsh classes, just for fun.

But ghost it sounds as though a lot of this is taking place in English.

tara I suppose I'll have to take your word for it. Not a scenario I've encountered.

tarashill

Are these men, by any chance.....

.....

swarthy? ?

I believe your cousin, FWIW, tarshill. That's horrendous to endure at work. Bad enough in the street.

but in the case if the plates thats because she wanted me to hear what she was saying and the cloth thing, in both situations it was like they were looking for an argument.

im defo not included in general conversation

and they had to speak to me in english in that case because they wanted me to do something for them

Welshies are sooo guilty for this! aloy of my fellow countrymen dont realise I speak welsh because ive got a pooosh accent. It is really fascinating listoning to people jabber away thinking they are having a private chat.
Some of my best gossip sources ;)

If English was good enough for Jesus then it should be good enough for everyone

I haven't read the whole thread, but it's just bad manners.

if the majority of people at work speak say English then everyone should speak that all the time

ahbollocks You mean the Welsh people you know do it.

I've never heard it done. I've taken English friends into places full of Welsh speakers, and the friends have insisted on more than one occasion that they're being spoken about, and the Welsh people only started speaking Welsh as soon as they walked in.

It's bollocks as, listening to the conversation, you can tell they're halfway through a totally innocuous conversation with nothing to do with anyone in the bar. We don't have an Angloradar that tells us when we have to switch, you know I always think it's a bit egotistical... most of us have better things to do than gossip about strangers in Welsh

Rationaloptimist .......Were you ridiculing my use of the word "foreign"? I'm sorry I couldn't think of a better word to use. Good grief.

TBH I think it's perfectly acceptable to speak in your native language when you're in a workplace setting that otherwise uses English - but as I work in the translation/localisation field with a lot of people whose first language isn't English, I'm probably a special case.

Having a conversation in English and then switching to another language when someone who only understands English approaches you is out-and-out rude, though, because you're openly signalling that you don't want the English speaker to be part of your conversation.

Both tara's cousin's and ghost's problems are now emerging pretty clearly as problems with people not language. Both workplace situationswould be equally unpleasant if nobody spoke anything but English. (Being sexually harassed in English wouldn't be better, it's not the language that's the issue! OPs work colleagues appear to be bullying or complaining about her in English - making them have their private conversations in English is hardly going to force them to be friendly to OP or include her in normal conversation - it sounds more likely that it will make excluding her more pointed.) I wonder how much effort OP has made if she says she's tried "a couple of times" in overa year... OP does seem to think the eexisting employees should have been going out of their way to welcome her rather than her making an effort when she started. However they may also be Cliquey" and/ or plain unpleasant people.

After all this the language debate is an absolute red herring.

I can't agree that it is just a people problem. There will always be people problems in any workplace. Talking in a different language around workmates is a separate issue entirely....it creates bad feelings, distrust and alienates a workforce. It can't be dismissed so easily as just people problems. Read my link up thread.

tara I did skim your link - it's just an unoriginal piece recounting David Cameron ' s views. It adds nothing and is irrelevant to your cousin' s situation as you describe it.

I've been in the situation you describe btw as a 16 year old doing a summer job at a theme park - I had to sit on a works bus with mostly men in their 20s who made constant sexually innuendos about me to one another, every morning and evening and whenever they had occasion to be in the part of the park where I worked. It was horrendous and as a 16 year old fresh from an all girl's school I was absolutely ill equipped to deal with it and unaware there was anything I could do. Every one of them was English and in fact local to the area - they picked on me because I had a non local English accent and was a 16 year old female. Perhaps if I had managed to adopt the local accent I would have fitted into the community better and we'd all have been great buddies

I appreciate we all have different views and you are entitled to yours Mrtumble....... the sexual harassment is something that women have endured in the workplace since time began(thankfully not as much now afaik) . In my cousins predicament there are two elements, the harassment, and the deliberate use of their native language. I think their choice of their native language adds to their "thrill" or whatever it is they get out of it. I think that talking in another language unnecessarily makes it twice as intimidating. They also use their native language working around other men. It's deliberate and unnecessary and basically makes for an unhappy work place.

Rude to speak a language that not everyone can understand in the workplace.

I used to work with a lot of South Africans. Quite frequently a few of them joked around in Afrikaans until the day that they were caught making racist comments [by a non SA native who had spent his childhood in SA] and exposed. I never heard them say a word in Afrikaans again.

Two girls I know of were caught on the Tube making open and massively inappropriate comments about how attractive one of the passengers was. They speak a fairly obscure language [in terms of population] but were mortified to be pulled up on their comments by another passenger. It was pretty obvious to the whole carriage that they'd been told off which was quite amusing.