Language issues

[Open Brackets] http://www.openbrackets.com/article/629/le-business has a thoughtful piece about linguistic imperialism: English-speaking companies that force workers (in France) to learn English. I sometimes have the reverse desire. Although the place where I work is in Italy, with lots of native and fluent speakers of Italian, we conduct most of our business in English. That gives me not enough opportunity to develop my lousy Italian. And, I fear, it sometimes leads to misunderstandings among colleagues. But it is extremely difficult to strike a difficult balance between people who are more proficient in English than I am in Italian, and vice versa.