Language Barriers

My two friends and I battled it out with a brig full of French-speaking pirates and won. We were on a voyage doing...something, and suddenly I heard over the proxy chat what sounds like gibberish. I listen harder and no, it's not some weird code words or phrases; they were speaking French. Where I live, it's relatively important to know at least some French, so I listened in and realised...they're arguing about coming back, then decided to. I alert my ship mates and one seemed skeptical, until I kindly reminded him that I speak French and he doesn't, then indicated that the French brig was trying to sneak in while we were busy. That's when we spun the ship around and sunk them. Again.
When they came to fight, I greeted them in French, which kinda freaked them out, as I hadn't said anything in French on our first meeting, and they realized too late that they were busted. They tried to up their fluency, but we upped our PvP in response.