Air Hostess Skill, Fluency in Second Language

Many airlines stress on the fluency of a second language. For domestic airlines, it normal to have the country's language as the prime language for the cabin crews and the international language as the secondary language. For international carriers like SIA, MAS and AirAsia, the primary language is English and other languages depend on the destination.

How do airlines determine the second language?. Basically it is based on 2 factors, first the demography of the passengers and secondly, the passengers language profile. Take for example, for flight from Kuala Lumpur to Tokyo, the highest count of passengers are Malaysia and the second is Japanses. The language profiles of these passengers, 80% of the onboard Malaysian can speak English and for the Japanese, 70% can only speak Japanese.

So it is obvious the the second language should be Japanese.

The the issues will be be, how do you get the cabin crew to have the Japanese speaking capacity. The airlines will normally take a multiple approaches to this. You can sometime see that SIA and MAS advertise for Japanese national crews. The second approach is to motivate crews to acquire the skills to speak the language. The motivation can be two form, reimbursement for the expenses of the course and second language allowance.