Originally Posted by cblaisd

Uh, since for many/most of them it is their first language, my experience is that they tend to comprehend it just as well as Americans

Yes, accents can indeed be a bar to understanding, but I'm not sure that's terribly different than, say, a Scotsman and a Cajun both speaking English and (was this Churchill's phrase) being divided by a common language.



That's not the issue either.

The issue is that UA did an outstandingly lousy job of training the ICC agents, and at the same time did not put in enough ICC supervisors who were well-trained and could therefore actually both deviate from the script and who could recognize the occasions that called for that.

It was those factors that made dealing with the ICC for anything but the most plain-vanilla routine thing so painful.

But they do speak English and they do understand it. In fact, the language is spoken and understood many places in the world