Recently on Polish internet discussion forums a question of banning Polish language at work has been discussed. It has been told about occasional cases when Polish people have been told not to speak in Polish while they were at work. Some of my compatriots are outraged because of that. For others (including me) it is obvious that in some cases, we should speak English at work.
There are many reasons we should speak English at work. At first… we are living in Ireland, and English language is the most spoken lingo in here, and it is one of the official languages (after Gaeilge). So if we are working together with Irish persons it is right to speak their language. We can’t expect Irish people to learn Polish since we are the strangers or - to be correct – emigrants. Besides it seems that Irish themselves show a lot of good will and they are trying to provide as many as it is possible information or services in Polish language. Moreover in my opinion Irish people are very tolerant towards level of English we can speak (i.e. this blog). They expect us to speak English enough to communicate.
The cases of banning Polish language are rather seldom contrary to quite often situations when Irish people are lost being outnumbered by their Polish mates at work. Good example is site I am working on. There is only about 5 English speakers (not only Irish), and dozen or more Polish people. More than half of the Polish staff can’t speak English at level enough to communicate without any problems and speak almost only Polish on site which is in most cases ok, nevertheless some of non Polish speakers and Irish admit that sometimes they fill like not in Ireland.
Of course there is no point in some cases to force people scattered in a wide site to speak in English if the closest English speaker is about 30 – 40 m away. I have just shown that from the other hand this situation can be uncomfortable for Irish people too.
Working only with Polish compatriots and using Polish language almost 24 hours per day is not good for us too. It makes us lazy, who wants to learn English if he can speak Polish all day. I know many Polish people who have been in Ireland for many months and they don’t speak English. Being not good at English we can’t expect promotions at work or social advancement, but the question is: how many of us are expecting it at all? How many of us realized that we – as emigrants - came into a different culture and without even a partial integration we will close ourselves in a national Polish getto and this finally ends in dislike or aversion of local folk.
I would just like to say I agree and cannot believe that there would be many Employers that would stop Polish people from speaking their language and I agree entirely with what you say, I have come to love the Polish very much, hard working and friendly and that is what any country welcomes when they open their door (alot more than I can say about others!!)
We Irish are getting sick of the lack of integration an respect for our culture. We see our cultures are as water and oil in many cases. This feeling among the Irish will grow further especially as we enter a recession. We as a people have much more in common with our south American brothers and hope more will come to our shores, as they have no fear of integration, and seem to have a genuine respect for the Irish culture, as we do for there’s.