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.