One summer evening in Berlin many years ago, I remember sitting outside of a grimy youth hostel with a group of fellow Interrailers. We had just finished school and the vibe was cheery: beer bottles clinked, introductions were made and travel stories shared. The group was diverse in age, mostly Western European, and comfortably switched between German, French, English and Dutch. But to my regret, I noticed that the British travellers had largely decided to stick to themselves, in a monolingual safe space.
Britons’ discomfort with languages is well recognised. PG Wodehouse notoriously wrote of: “The shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.” The extent of the problem is clear. We are among the worst linguists in Europe. Only 2 per cent of Britons can read and write in two foreign languages, compared to 84 per cent in a country our prime minister has recently been laughed out of: Luxembourg. This year only 3.6 per cent of A-levels were in languages, with German and French dropping precariously fast and the rise in Mandarin and Spanish failing to compensate.
Yet never has our monolingualism been more a tragedy than today. Without a critical number of polyglots, non-Anglophone culture remains a niche appreciation in the UK. Be it one of Richard Strauss’s German operas, or French rapper Nekfeu’s hauntingly brilliant new album Les étoiles vagabondes. Even in London, so much culture passes us by.
Our lack of linguistic exertion has more practical consequences. A professor of languages told a House of Commons committee that the UK’s language deficiencies cost us 3.5 per cent of GDP, from lost contracts and unfilled positions. “Global Britain” will be a cheap fallacy if we can’t speak the languages of business and diplomacy in South America, China or sub-Saharan Africa.
Language learning has been shown to improve cognitive performance and memory. Moreover, studying a second language is the best way to understand one’s mother tongue. Painstakingly constructing a grammatically correct sentence in another language helps one appreciate how one’s own language works.
So what is the solution? The Erasmus programme opens doors to new worlds. Some of my happiest days were spent living in a tiny maid’s chamber in Paris, while attending Sciences Po. Subtitled television is one way to get to know a language: Channel 4’s Walter Presents offers a range of foreign dramas, from Italian police dramas to Japanese horror. Most London universities offer short courses and night classes, for those who take a more academic approach.
To be proficient in another language is to have a window into new worlds of culture and life. Of course it has various practical and economic benefits, not least for a country that has such profound links with the rest of the world. But the simple pleasure of addressing someone in their mother tongue remains priceless.
