I never got why employers are so obsessed about people having worked in language whatever.
In my experience, this is because "employers" in this context means the people who are either doing the hiring process, or are the top management. That is, they are people who have no concept of what a programming language is. So they make the obvious connection based on the terminology: It's like a (written, probably) human language. This means that it's so complex, inconsistent, and full of special cases that it takes years for anyone to become fluent.
I've experimented in a few interviews, and tried to get across what learning a programming language is really like. One of the example I like to bring up is my introduction to C. I borrowed a colleague's "C bible", took it home for the weekend, and read through it. On Monday morning, I sat down at a terminal at work and tried writing a few programs. One of my self-assigned programs was a functional sort routine, which I had running and correctly sorting some available multi-Mbyte datasets by noon. After lunch, I coded up another half dozen sort routines, wrote an inteface routine that took pointers to a data set and a sort function and churned out the results. I tested all the sort routines on all several dozen available datasets, and printed out the sort speed for each routine on each dataset. (The results of this surprised a lot of people, who knew the usual estimated speeds of sorts on random data, but of course none of our datasets were anywhere close to random. Some were really upset when the winner on several of our - very non-random - datasets was the bubble sort. ;-)
Inevitably, though, the interviewers decided that I was lying. Nobody could learn a language that fast, y'know. They were clearly puzzled about why I would even try to pass off such a blatant lie, when anyone would know it couldn't be possible. My colleagues in the DP department weren't surprised, of course; they'd all done similar things to learn other languages. Sorting is a well-defined subject with lots of well-defined algorithms that they could mostly code up in a few hours, and C is a logical, well-defined language that was (almost;-) completely described in a rather small book. But the HR and manager types that did the hiring all judged the difficulty by imagining how long it would take them to learn to explain a sort algorithm fluently in a strange human language, and by that misunderstanding, I had to be lying, because nobody can learn a language that well in only a weekend.
(Actually, I've only tried this sort of thing after I've already decided I don't want the job. Making them thing you're lying during the interview isn't really a good idea if you want a job. ;-)
Anyway, if you understand this, you understand why employers might not want to hire someone who doesn't know a language. They're thinking of examples like opening a sales organization in Pakistan or Thailand, and what would happen if they hired people who weren't fluent in the local languages to run the sales campaigns. The computer folks' use of the term "language" makes them think that hiring a programmer who doesn't know language X to write software in language X will be that sort of disaster, and they can't wait the years it'd take to develop the sort of fluency they need. There's nothing you can do to teach them about their serious lack of understanding. If you try, you'll just be labelled a liar, so don't bother trying to educate them.