The economics of learning languages

There is a kind of conversation which sounds intelligent, and which makes sense at first hearing, but which deeper thought reveals to be stupid. A classic example of this is the dinner party trope where some poncy polyglot belittles the British or Americans for being terrible at learning foreign languages.

The raw facts seem to bear this out. But further consideration reveals a reason behind this discrepancy. Seen through the lens of time, it is much harder to learn a foreign language if your first language is English than if it isn’t. How so?

Well let’s imagine how a Swede, say, might approach the issue: 1. ‘Do I need to learn another language?’ 2. ‘What language should I learn first?’ Easy answers. 1. ‘Yes’ and 2. ‘English’. Swedes need English not only to speak to English people, but even to speak to Danes or Finns — to swap herring recipes, perhaps, or to coordinate their shameless reciprocal voting tactics for the next Eurovision Song Contest.

Now for most native English speakers aged 25 or under — the decisive age for this decision — the respective answers to those questions are: 1. ‘I’m not sure’ and 2. ‘No idea’. The world does not really have a second second-language.

Moreover, for an English speaker,the act of learning any other language is not progressively rewarding: indeed my learning Swedish is almost completely useless until my Swedish is better than the typical Swede’s English, which would require that I live in Sweden for several years. A Swede gains useful fluency with every new English word learned — and all they need do is watch TV (there’s not, I think, a single episode of Dallas that they didn’t see).