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"the majority of European anarchists I have known (not counting the anglophones, of course!) were either generally competent in English or actively aiming to be, regardless of their own language background,"

Well, you haven't been to Italy, Greece, Spain, France ... in the places where people learn only one language at school they usually learn the one from the country next. Italians speak much better french than english for example (most don't speak english at all), french from south-east speak much better spanish than anything else. And have you tried to speak english with a spanish or a greek ? Well, good luck with that ! Only the Germans are not so bad, because from german learning english is really easy as this languages are siblings, but when Germans speak english it's still pretty funny, because the same words in both languages doesn't mean the same pronunciation !
It's only recently that English is obligatory in school in France, for example, before you could decide to learn spanish, or italian, or german, latin, ancient greek, arabic, russian, euskara, occitan, brezhoeg, and not english ! Now english has to be the first foreign language (most of the time, but with regional languages it's otherwise, as it's not foreign languages I guess).

I wouldn't imagine any anarchist even in France where people speak an other language and not french. A language is just a language, people don't choose wich moth togue they have and where thet grew up. But, if I go to live in Germany I learn german, if I go to Argentina I learn spanish, so I don't understand how people who live in Québec don't bother to learn french. And since years always the ones who don't even try to make any effort, who think that they have the privilege that everyone has to adept to them, are anglophones. Maybe anarchists have to realize that english is the language of the power, the language of the capital, and it should be a good motivation for anglophones to do like veyone else in the world, to learn an other language. Why not the language of your neighboor region so you could organize with them !
In France its thanks to italian speaking comrades that we are informed when repression happens, or anything, and it's really important ! Languages are a wonderful diversity and a bridge between each others ! Languages have nothing to do with nationalism, with Politics ! They are used by politicians, but they are just the fruit of the mixture of people and linguistic evolution. Take Spanish, how this colonial language, which is still nowadays destroying native languages in Latin America, can be at the same time mixed with native accents and native languages, and have an incredible diversity of vocabulary. Fruits and vegetables are totally different from one country to an other in spanish, and that can make very funny scenes, where hispanophones from different places sometimes don't understand each others if what they speak is influenced by the local pre-columbian language.