Bilingual People Share Their Greatest “I Didn’t Know You Spoke the Language” Stories

Be Careful What You Say When You Don’t Know Who’s Listening

My parents are Hungarian, so I learned to speak the language despite being in a part of Australia with a very small (and rather old) Hungarian community. I was walking around a shopping centre with my dog when I hear an elderly couple loudly saying horribly racist things about a passing Arabic family, calling them disgusting, breeders, and ironically saying they should ‘go back where they came from.’

I walked up to them and simply said, in Hungarian, “Be careful what you say, because you never know who might understand you,” and casually walked away. The silence was golden. Anacado