This thought is about language. Or, rather, about other people's languages, and making some of their languages our own. Yesterday, I dropped by to pay Maricarmen for cleaning our house - I'm in Spain at present. She wasn't in, but her husband Paco poured me a beer and we started to put the world to rights while waiting for her to get home. She eventually arrived with their dog, which had been shorn like a sheep by the local vet - a source of great merriment. Then, their neighbour Manolo arrived with a case of young wine from the Alpujarra. We all had a glass of very potent wine and toasted each other other's health.


All this banter was conducted in the local Gualchos variant of the Andalucian dialect of Spanish, which even some folks from Madrid would find hard to understand. None of my friends have a word of English between them. Without my knowledge of Spanish and my steadily improving ear for "Gualchero", I could not have shared this part of their lives.



In this same village there are English people who have lived here over 20 years and have little or no Spanish. They meet up for drinks, watch Sky together and take little trips together. And, when they leave or die, the local people say "we didn't even know who was living there". I think that's sad.


If we want to give youngsters a reason to learn a foreign language, surely this is it: to be able to share a joke at the bar, get your builder to do what you want, ask a nice girl out for a date. If it's about anything, it's about communicating with others.


But I have to say - as somebody who's earned his living from machine translation for the past 10 years - that Google Translate wouldn't have made much sense of what went on at Maricarmen's house yesterday.