Here’s something that I found rather surprising about life here: There’s a lot of English in use, and in many cases, it appears to be used to avoid showing favoritism to any of the local languages.
Take, for example, this can of Del Monte peeled tomatoes that I bought in a local supermarket. The front of the can looks like something you’d see in the United States; everything is in English. There’s a picture on the can, which I’m sure is helpful for identifying the contents to anyone who can’t read English.
But when you turn the can to the side, it’s quite clear that this packaging was made specifically for this region of Europe and not for an English-speaking country. In small type, there’s a description of the contents and a list of ingredients in English followed by five other languages: Slovenian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Albanian and Macedonian.
I presume that the logic behind this is that none of these languages is large enough that it’s cost-effective to make packaging in that language alone. It’s certainly possible to treat two languages roughly equally; a lot of Canadian packaging has English on one side and French if you turn the package 180 degrees around. But there’s no practical way to do that with five languages. So rather than picking one local language to be dominant and offending speakers of the other four, they make English dominant.
This makes a lot of sense once you think about it. Tetovo is a mostly Albanian-speaking city in a mostly Macedonian-speaking country. Many people in Tetovo speak Albanian as a native language and speak English better than Macedonian. And plenty of people in the country speak Macedonian as a native language and English at least competently if not fluently. People who don’t read English at all can see the picture to get a good guess at the contents and rotate the can for the small type to confirm what’s inside.
But it’s taken some getting used to. For most of my life, whenever I’ve seen something presented in multiple languages, it’s been the norm that at least one of them is Spanish or French.