Legal Commentary

Sometimes one sees on a CV a line about foreign languages stating "fluency."  How competent in the language must one be to claim fluency?  The ability to read and write the language is not something that is likely to be tested at an interview, but the ability to speak might be.  How deep a knowledge of the language, what degree of facility, or what, if any, intimacy with a culture in which the language is spoken, is good enough?

Italian is my first language and when I was a kid I spoke it with as much regularity as English.  Over time, my command of the language has become rustier.  I still think that I speak Italian with greater ease than any other language besides English.  And I like to read Italian literature, newspapers, web sites, etc.  And so I call myself fluent in Italian on my CV.

But I'm not really fluent; I'm only fluent in the way that Americans believe themselves to be fluent, in very much the same way that they're sure that they have really gotten to know a foreign culture by having traveled there a few times.  For us, if you studied a language for a few years in school, spent some months in a country in which the language is spoken (generally, "when I was a student"), and are now able to string together a few consecutive responsive and jarringly accented sentences, you've achieved something approaching fluency.  And we are liberal in claiming fluency on our CVs under something like those circumstances.  I don't think it's like that in most of the rest of the world as respects the English language.  Most of the foreigners I know well are Europeans and their knowledge of and intimacy with English on average greatly exceeds our comparative facility with other languages.  The reasons are complex, and perhaps they will change with time. 

But here's my proposal: "fluency" should be reserved for those people who can understand humor and jokes in the language for which they claim it.  If you get -- if you feel yourself to be on the inside of -- the humor of a culture expressed in its own language by natives, then you're fluent.  Of course, under this definition one could be a fluent Spanish speaker and "get" the inside jokes of Mexico, but not Spain.  That's fine -- so long as you can palpate with ease the humorous underbelly of at least one country where the language is spoken.  But if, like most of us, when you are in a group of native speakers who are laughing and nodding knowingly together about some delightful little joke or bon mot, the best you can do is offer a dumb, ignorant grin, hoping that no one will perceive your alien creature status, then you're not fluent.  You should use a label that connotes something less than mastery of the language.  Maybe obfluent, or affluent.