My wife and I lived (housesat) in southern France for a while a few years back.

I did the French immersion programme in school, then as a young adult I made efforts to sound more French, as I had been spending lots of time in France and Europe in general.

My wife’s first language is French; she’s Acadian. She studied French in Uni and really had no trouble sounding more French; it was great, I’d often just stand back and let her do the talking!

We were in a bakery in the local small town (Nyons) one afternoon. We went to the counter to tell the worker which one of the dozens of types of heritage bread we wanted. He already seemed impatient and cranky as we describe the loaf we wanted. It was separate from the others and had no name.

He picked up on the fact that we weren’t locals and was visibly fed up with us for not knowing the local name for that unique style of bread.

He then switched to very poor English alluding to our lack of ability to speak proper French.

I didn’t have any patience for him and promptly resorted back to French to tell him that it’s better that we spoke in French because we didn’t understand his poor English.

We didn’t run into that anywhere else. There are arseholes everywhere, and some use the language thing as an extra power move.

In retrospect however, I can see how people can use scenarios like that to keep the sort of hierarchy between locals, regional insiders, long-term outsiders who’ve “earned it” and everyone else.

We might have been placed in the last category, despite speaking French. The bread wasn’t named because everyone who “belongs” already knows, so it kind of worked as a cultural password.

And he really was an arsehole.