Language on the aircraft: the crew who speak five, the passengers who assume, and the announcement that went wrong
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#1 Moroccan, Qatar, and I speak Arabic, French, English, some Spanish and enough Tagalog to make my flatmate laugh. On a typical flight I use four. This thread is for the multilingual crew and the specific comedy and usefulness of it.
The useful
The passenger who does not speak English and is frightened and hears their language from the crew. It changes their whole flight. I have done this in French for a grandmother from Dakar, in Arabic for a family from Algiers who thought nobody would understand them, and in Spanish, badly, for a man from Bogotá who was so relieved he did not care that it was bad.
The announcements. On the Casablanca route the French PA is mine and I am proud of it. On the Manila route the Filipino crew do the Tagalog one and the cabin cheers.
The assumptions
Passengers assume, from my face, that I speak Arabic (yes), that I am from the Gulf (no), that I do not speak French (I do, better than them sometimes), and that I cannot understand what they are saying about the crew in their own language. I can. We all can. The number of things said about crew in a language the crew speaks is very high and the crew's faces never change.
The announcement that went wrong
A colleague, not me, doing the Arabic PA on a Gulf route with a Moroccan dialect word for a common item that means something different in Gulf Arabic. The cabin laughed. The purser did not know why. The colleague found out on the crew bus. Nobody will tell you the word. It is in the crew room forever.
The question
How many languages do you use on a normal flight, which one has been the most useful in a way you did not expect, and what is your announcement story?
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#2 Turkish, British, and I use English and Turkish and, on the Italian routes, a Turkish accented Italian that the Italian passengers find charming for reasons I do not understand. The most useful unexpectedly: the Turkish, with the Turkish grandmothers, who now adopt me on sight.
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#3 Qatar, Indian, and I use English, Hindi, Malayalam and some Arabic on a normal flight. The Malayalam on the Kerala routes is the one that changes faces. And yes, the things said about the crew in Hindi, assuming the Indian crew are somewhere else. We are right here.
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#4 Korean Air, and English, Korean, Japanese and enough Mandarin. The announcement that went wrong for us was a Japanese PA with a politeness level too low for a Japanese cabin. The cabin was silent. The purser knew why. It was discussed.
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#6 Air France, and I use French and English and Spanish, and the passenger who says something about the crew in French on a flight where the whole crew is French is a daily event and a daily pleasure.
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#7 Wizz, Polish and English only, and on the UK routes the British passengers assume no Polish crew speak English well, and then we do, and their faces are the reward.