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Sunday, 17 July 2011, 15:48
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Edited by Patrick Andrews, Sunday, 17 July 2011, 15:49
I heard on the radio that Chelsea players have all been told that they should speak English on club premises. This strikes me as dubious in terms of rights if they are having private conversations with team mates who speak the same language. I would be interested in what people like Phillipson, who write about linguistic human rights, think about this.
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I totally agree. It's a basic human right to slag off your team mates at work in a foreign language that they don't understand and so can't respond to.
Where would we be if there were no secrets and everybody in the world could understand each other. It would be total chaos.
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This seems to assume that they would be "slagging off their colleagues". If you want to undermine people, you would not have to do it in a foreign language. What I was suggesting is that people who share a language should have the right to use that language when they are talking to each other.