The British media has got into one of its regular funks about Britons not learning foreign languages. As the only monoglot in a family of polyglots, it is an issue I have had a lifelong sensitivity about. But as always, the national hand-wringing displays more ignorance than insight.
The wailing follows a regular pattern – we Brits are lazy, it damages our international reputation, and is bad for the economy. But given that our children are leading the Western world in reading, writing and arithmetic, it is unlikely that they are noticeably more lazy than those of other countries.
A slightly more sophisticated argument points out that since our mother tongue is the global lingua franca – the language of business, of science, of tourism, of international pop music and film – we have less personal incentive to learn a new language. If you are Greek and don’t learn another language, you will only ever speak to fellow Greeks, and will never speak to a foreigners. In contrast, the British can already chat with most of the world. The rewards for the effort of learning a new language are much less than for those whose mother tongue is not already the global language.
That is true, but it also misses what is really happening. There are two fundamental issues that never get mentioned that discourage us learning another language with any proficiency. The first is that we are unique in the developed world in having so many other countries share our language – we have an extended international family. If you look at where people go to study, to work, where they go on holiday, and who they marry, the British totally disproportionately chose the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. I have a Canadian wife and an American step-family. We have all these international options without having to get a phrasebook. A massive one third of the global economy is English-speaking, a world of opportunity readily accessible to us. No other developed country has that to any extent – the Spanish can converse with much of Latin America, but differences in economic development mean it offers much less.
The second unspoken but powerful reason Britons aren’t good at learning other languages is that there is no obvious language to learn. We traditionally teach French in schools, but it is not even in the top ten languages globally, and unless you go on holiday to France you will not get much chance to use it. I got an A in my French O Level, but then didn’t use the language for twenty years until I moved to Brussels, by which time I had forgotten most of it. Spanish is the most widely spoken language in terms of number of countries, German has the most native speakers in Europe, but Mandarin has the most globally.
If you are British, every time you travel outside the Anglosphere, you have a new different language to learn. On my bookshelf I have teach yourself books in Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Hungarian, Vietnamese, German, Hindi, Indonesian and Swahili. I do try, I really do – I am learning Spanish with Duolingo at the moment – but there is very little reinforcement. The fact is, if you are British, learning another language means having few opportunities to practice it, unless you seek them out.
English is a wonderful gift to humanity
Compare this to Scandinavians (and I write as someone who is half Norwegian), or even the French or Germans. Almost every time they travel anywhere in the world they will end up practicing and improving their English. I remember smiling in Sao Paulo when French tourists were complaining bitterly about Brazilians not speaking English, while I tried to get by in Portuguese. I have tried to use my Norwegian in Oslo, but they always take pity and reply in fluent English.
The overwhelming majority of EU officials in Brussels spend their days working in the English language. At one European summit, the French leader of the European business group addressed government leaders in English. France’s president Jacques Chirac stopped him to demand why a Frenchman was speaking English in Brussels. The French businessman replied it was because English is the language of international business. Chirac stormed out.
Whether it is watching films, listening to music or travelling, if you are a non-English speaker, there is non-stop enforcement of English. One of my Danish cousins is a Dane working for a Danish company in Denmark, and yet the only time he speaks Danish at work is when he says hello to the security guards when he enters the building. His English is perfect, obviously.
I am all in favour of learning other languages – I have spent much of my life attempting to do so – but we really should stop beating ourselves up about it, and denouncing ourselves for being lazy and embarrassing. We are the only country to have given the world its first and only truly global language (the first lingua franca was just a diplomatic language). That has brought economic benefits to Britain, and to the world. English is a wonderful gift to humanity, allowing peoples to speak unto peoples as never before in history, and there is nothing embarrassing about that.
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