The moment people hear I am from the USA (and the South, at that!), they assume that the only language I could possibly know is English. I often say nothing until it is absolutely necessary, and then watch their jaws drop.
One time, I was with a friend from Greece who had grown in up in Canada, where his father was a military attaché for the Greek government. He had married a woman from Sweden, and lived there for many years, and was fluent in Swedish and English. He and I were once having breakfast at a hotel in the Netherlands, seated across from an elderly couple from Sweden. They were having a conversation about how infested the hotel was with "foreigners," glancing at my Greek friend and me. We said nothing, although we understood every word they said. Then they started complaining about the service, which was indeed slow. The woman got up and grabbed the coffee pot and filled the cups of her husband and herself. Being the polite Scandinavian, she asked us in English if we would like some coffee before she returned the pot to the heater. We said yes, thank you, and then continued in Swedish, saying, "by the way, you don't have to switch to English on our account. We both are fluent in Swedish." Their jaws dropped to the floor, and, needless to say, the comments about the dirty foreigners ceased altogether.
Another time, I was in a small commuter plane from Brussels to Düsseldorf, and the sun was just setting. There were a group of businessmen from northeastern Spain on the flight, all speaking Catalan. I had a window seat, and one of the Catalans was next to me. He was talking to his colleagues and at one point tried to read off a document, but was having trouble due to the glare from the window. I said "puc tancar la finestra si vol," which is the polite form of "I can close the window if you wish." Without reflection, he said, "si, gràcies (yes, thanks)," and turned back to his colleagues before he realized that I had spoken to him in his own language. "Did you just speak to me in Catalan?" I said, yes, I did. He asked if I was Catalan, and I said, no American. How in the world do you know Catalan? Oh, I lived in Barcelona for a while when I was a teenager.
The sister of my daughter's boyfriend once joined us at a concert in Stuttgart, and we had never met. She knew I was American, but that is all she knew, so she started speaking English to me. I answered back in English. She started telling me she knew how awfully difficult German was for us (stupid--implied, not expressed aloud) Americans to learn. I said, really? It doesn't sound so difficult. She said, oh yes, Americans have a very hard time with German words. I said it sounded easy to me. What word did she have in mind? Figuring she would lose me completely, she said, "Streichholzschächtelchen," which means "little match box." I repeated it back to her perfectly, and asked, "what's so hard about that?" She just stammered, "well, most Americans can't say it." I asked if she had asked "most Americans," or was that just an assumption on her part?
I have a lot of fun that way! And, over the years, I have left a lot of Europeans a lot less secure in their certainty how stupid and ignorant we Americans are. If a German starts to confirm it to me, I just ask if he or she has ever heard about Erwin Kreuz and "I left my heart in Bangor?" Most haven't, but when they look him up, I remind them that each country has its own county bumpkins, but it doesn't mean we all are.
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