Chilly times for languages in England

The New Year has started amid the seasonal snow and ice with the chill spreading to higher education in England through falling student applications. The climate is chillier still for languages, which seem more affected by students’ economic anxieties than other subjects. There is irony in this since graduates from languages degrees have traditionally fared better in the job market than most of their peers (other than medicine and law). And recent surveys of employers have particularly emphasised the value of languages and of the experience of living abroad.

Languages may also be suffering from the resurgence of anti-European sentiment in parts of the English political landscape. Just as language degrees boomed in the run up to the Single Market in the 1990s, they are now dipping in the isolationist mood of the 2010s. The ironies in this are that the economic prospects of the UK are intimately bound up with those of our closest neighbours and increasingly dependent on a globalising world where many of the new powers are not English-speaking.

No doubt there is a cyclical aspect to all of this and perhaps the chill will be followed by a thaw. But languages are not a separate domain from the rest of society and the stance of 'going it alone' brings with it a tendency not to talk to anybody, and certainly not in their language. Languages come into their own when the trend of European and international relationships is to build on partnerships and collaboration rather on confrontation.

Languages at War

Language is an issue in almost every aspect of conflict: in training and preparation for action, in intelligence work, in talking to people on the ground and in different military units communicating with each other. I studied the UN and NATO actions in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s, when Yugoslavia was breaking up in a messy succession of regional and ethnic conflicts. It started as a peacekeeping operation and ended as a large scale rebuilding of the country. Winning hearts and minds was at the centre of the operations, and you can’t do that if you can’t communicate.

In practice, the military rely heavily on local people to act as intermediaries, interpreting and translating for them. But it is often a difficult relationship, when the military don’t know how much to trust the people they employ locally, and the local interpreters don’t know how they will be regarded by their own people. It can be a dangerous job and they can face an uncertain future when the military move out.

The military need at least some personnel to have a good knowledge of the local languages, but that is a big commitment for individuals and a big investment by the forces, who in practice will only ever be able to train a small number of specialists. Of course, they need a larger number of officers and troops who are able to communicate at a basic level. We also discovered that multinational forces are now the norm, and they work in a multilingual environment, even where there is a lingua franca such as international English.

We interviewed more than 50 people who had been involved in the Bosnia operation, military and civilians. We were wowed by their stories and collected a lot of lessons that need to be learned. We are discovering that it is not easy to transfer the lessons from one conflict to another. But we have succeeded in putting language issues on the radar for British military planners, and for the Imperial War Museum, who both helped us with the research. And we have sparked more researchers to study languages in conflict.