A language learners’ forum

All the flights I've been on have had English, even the low-cost ones inside of China.

The first "real-life" Indonesian I ever heard was a plane announcement. I remember not being able to understand the written Indonesian (of course there was English too) on the plane interior itself, things like "Keep your seatbelt fastened at all times." A few months later I flew domestically in Indonesia again and could understand it all.

I also have a happy memory of sitting next to a Chinese woman on a flight from Germany to China, speaking English and Mandarin with her. The German flight attendant came up to offer drinks and did it all in German with me, even though he'd just used English with her. Of course he could tell that I wasn't a native German speaker but it was very nice of him to accept my German as adequate for the occasion.

I feel like plane travel is so scripted, though, that as a passenger you don't really need any language at all to get things done. Boarding and immigration are different stories altogether of course.

In Alitalia they use beautiful Italian and incomprehensible English. As far as the accent is concerned.

Air Austria has good English and pretty clear English, accompanied by waltz music to get you in the spirit!

Aegean and Olympic have both Greek and English. Some English you can understand, some not, depends on who is speaking.

Generaly they speak so fast, that I feel like I'm taking a test in listening proficiency and failing!

I've been on a couple of trilingual flights: for example when flying from Greece to Italy with Ryanair there were announcements in Greek, Italian, and English.

One interesting point is the cabin crew choosing which language to use with passengers. When I've flown to or from Spain, they've asked "¿habla usted español?" (do you speak Spanish?), while to/from/inside Italy the question is always "Lei è italiano?" (are you Italian?) since clearly nobody from outside of Italy is capable of speaking Italian . Obviously the difference is almost entirely due to Spanish being the language of another nineteen countries, but I still find it quite telling and it's a strange one to react to: of course I'm not Italian, but answering no means having to struggle in English (invariably they don't speak it that well and can barely understand my accent), and saying "no but I speak the language" just gets a blank stare because it's so far from the norm.

When I flew home from the Czech Republic to the Netherlands last weekend, the flight was fully booked so they couldn't take my hand luggage in the cabin. So this woman from ground staff came up to me, asked "mluvite cesky" ("Do you speak Czech") and I said "Ano" (yes). She proceeded to ask me for my luggage and I asked "co se deje s bagazem" and she said I would be able to collect it at baggage reclaim at Schiphol. So apparently, although staff spoke English, they definitely preferred to speak Czech with me.

And this did not get a stare at all. Apparently they just figured I seemed to know what I was doing.

tarvos wrote:When I flew home from the Czech Republic to the Netherlands last weekend, the flight was fully booked so they couldn't take my hand luggage in the cabin. So this woman from ground staff came up to me, asked "mluvite cesky" ("Do you speak Czech") and I said "Ano" (yes). She proceeded to ask me for my luggage and I asked "co se deje s bagazem" and she said I would be able to collect it at baggage reclaim at Schiphol. So apparently, although staff spoke English, they definitely preferred to speak Czech with me.

Hey! Score one for the FLC. I understood the first two Czech sentences and the first word of the last.

I wasn't using the diacritics, so I don't blame you. The last phrase means "what's going on with the luggage?" Co se děje is a very common phrase in Czech, it means something like "what's going on?"

I love flying Icelandair. When they land in Iceland, they say "welcome to Iceland" in English... but "welcome home" in Icelandic!

I guess that means that if you speak Icelandic, you can consider Iceland your home.