English for business rather than pleasure

Why is it important that British people should be able to speak other languages? Doesn’t the rest of the world speak English? You don’t need to go as far as China to get a clear answer to that. Anyone who has had a car break down as they drove out of Calais will be able to confirm that this is a myth. The professional elites in many areas do have good English, but they speak it for business rather than for pleasure. If you want to build relationships you need to show that you respect their culture, and their language.

Coming out of the languages recession

For several years, the UK has been floundering in a languages recession. When the gravity of it became clear, a series of government interventions was launched, especially in England and Wales. The question is whether these have been effective and whether they can now be withdrawn. In fact the interventions have been effective in stemming the decline, but the recovery is still fragile. We can see green shoots, like the bottoming out of the decline at GCSE and A level. But it is still not a full-blown recovery.

Languages help Penelope Cruz

Pedro Almadóvar’s recent film, Los abrazos rotos (Broken Embraces), is shot almost entirely in Spanish. But there is a particularly surprising language moment for the beautiful but ill-fated heroine, played by Penelope Cruz. Having run away with her lover to Lanzarote, she eventually looks for work in a hotel. When asked whether she has any experience, she mentions that she has worked as a secretary, and then breaks into fluent English to demonstrate that she can speak the language well. The hotel owners are suitably impressed. Of course, this does not save her from her fate, but it does show that with the advantage of her language skills she has options and a chance to live independently.

Languages for social mobility

The recent report by Alan Milburn on fair entry into the professions identifies a lot of barriers to wider access. It doesn’t mention the language barrier though. Perhaps that is because languages are an invisible factor in social mobility.

All the evidence shows that learning languages at school tends to be concentrated in a narrow social range. Independent schools have no problem in maintaining language learning, but many state secondary schools are abandoning languages altogether from age 14. It appears that over half the people who enter one of the main professions went to an independent school, and therefore have a reasonable grounding in one or more languages. Perhaps there is a link here?

Not many professions have an explicit language requirement, but they do have a typical profile, and that generally involves a rounded education including a language. You might add that what languages give is a degree of personal confidence and access to a wider cultural experience that makes today’s professionals feel at ease in the international environment they inhabit. Ask the médecins sans frontières.

Stormy weather for languages

This generational economic crisis is turning out to be a stormy environment for languages in UK education. Our future is in the balance and we have two broad options.

We can batten down the hatches and ride out the storm, trusting that our place is in the higher levels of society’s hierarchy of needs. We may be neglected or forgotten when survival is threatened or when bread and butter issues predominate, but our role of cultural enrichment will once more be valued when things are calmer. At that point we will re-emerge, largely unchanged, though almost certainly smaller.

Or we can try to ride before the storm, believing that languages are important at all levels of society’s needs. They may be crucial factors in survival and have a key role to play in addressing bread and butter issues. When the storm abates we shall have changed significantly, but it may be that we have grown in the process.

Different parts of the languages community will make different choices, and many will try to combine both directions. Either way, we are going to need a lot of courage and imagination over the next few years.