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.

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.

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.