NEVER OK. Talk about it later if they must. I try to imagine if the guy did it all the time/was a total liar- or what it would take for someone to embarrass their spouse like this so publicly, even on their worst day and I just can't get myself to a point where I would ever do that.

I had a professor who treated several of us students very badly when we were out of the country on an exchange. At one point her husband joined us overseas and we learned a lot about who she was based on their dynamic. Upon our return we ended up telling the dean "here are some things she said/did to her husband publicly. If she treated the man she loves like this, trust us, she treated us much worse".

So in your situation, to sum up, he's a liar but she's a b!tch.

I don’t know why when I first read the post I thought you were talking about one of the love languages not an actual foreign language. Anyway, I think either surprise and/or gently setting the record straight could have been expressed as a question like “you do?”. That allows for the possibility that we have differing perceptions or definitions of what it means to speak x language versus you intentionally lying. The way the wife responded was very embarrassing because it was the double whammy of judging his efforts to learn the language to date (he doesn’t even know the basics) plus basically saying he was lying because it was so far from the truth that it couldn’t be his perception. Personally I think she was feeling some sort of way about things in their marriage and expressed it by putting down her spouse in front of co-workers which wasn’t cool.

I think the “line” so to speak with spouses is asking a question with an inflection gives the spouse a chance to clarify and you sort of leave it at we may see things differently versus all out calling the person a liar/putting them down or arguing about it in front of other people. Example, I might say in a group, oh when we sent in baked goods for school . Then DH responds with “we?” Then I might day, okay Larlo made the cupcakes but I made sure they got to school. Then maybe everyone laughs because they know Larlo makes the best dessert. That exchange is a far cry from DH responding with something like “what do you mean we, you don’t know how to boil water much less make a dessert”.