From
The Shrinking of Language
by Nicholas Murray, Planet 159

Unable to sleep, earlier this year, in a Prague hotel room, I found myself surfing the channels on a matchbox-size Roberts radio which I keep by me for these occasions. I soon discovered that a French news channel was broadcasting on FM and I listened in to an interview with the UN Chief Weapons Inspector, Dr Hans Blix. He spoke in an effortless, idiomatic French. Next morning I switched on the television to see the BBC World news where Dr Blix was speaking in an effortless and idiomatic English. The cable TV also had Italian, Spanish and German channels (as well as the ubiquitous CNN) and I wouldn’t have been surprised to encounter Dr Blix breezing his way through an interview in one or more of these languages.

Hans Blix, of course, is a Swede, and from the Scandinavians we expect this sort of thing. From ourselves, on the other hand, we seem to expect very little at all. Quite how one could determine these things accurately — statistically — I don’t know, but it is certainly my impression that contemporary Britain (I thus skate lightly over the very important exception of Wales) is more monoglot than it has ever been. The whole world speaks English (as I was to discover, shamefacedly, when I ventured out into the streets of an icy February Prague without a word of Czech) so why bother to learn another language?

The massive global conquest of English is remarkable and it has been greatly boosted by the use of English as the medium of business and the internet. It is not, of course, British English but American English that is being used. One sees this in small, trivial ways such as the universal adoption of the word “train station” (now given the seal of approval by BBC newsreaders) instead of “railway station” which was, until about five years ago, the word that teachers of English would have told their pupils to use. I choose a deliberately trivial example, for what on earth does it matter what we call a place where trains come to rest? The fact is that, across the globe, English will get you a lot further than almost any other language, a fact which is a powerful disincentive to learn another tongue if you are a native speaker of English. And this is a trend that is accelerating rapidly. There was considerable controversy in Switzerland last year when it was decided that English would replace French as the second language of schoolchildren in eight German-speaking Swiss states. The authorities said it was because of the growing importance of English in business and other spheres. Swiss critics said that failure to learn the languages of fellow Swiss nationals (64 per cent speak German as a first language, 19 per cent French, and 5 per cent Italian) would have a deleterious effect on mutual understanding between ethnic groups in Switzerland.

A survey published in the summer of 2002 by the Association for Language Learning (ALL) predicted that in the next two years the number of children taking GCSE language courses will fall by as much as 50 per cent in some schools. French and German, in particular, have declined in popularity very rapidly. The Government’s response has been to announce that language learning is no longer to be a compulsory part of the national curriculum after the age of 14 so we can confidently expect things to get worse. In the same week that the ALL survey was released, a group of UK ambassadors from France, Germany, Italy, and Spain wrote a joint letter to the press regretting that language learning in Britain had declined to such a point that it was becoming difficult for their countries to organise educational exchanges. A few months later the German ambassador in London, Thomas Matussek, claimed that many university departments of German had been reduced to “a token existence or even completely shut down” — confirmed by a survey of 30 universities which revealed that 70 per cent had either closed or slimmed their language departments in 2001…

…Does any of this matter? After all, one can get away with speaking English all over the globe. Every waiter from Calais to Canton can sing out a “No problem!” In the feelgood culture of Western consumerism why should one be expected to make an effort if one doesn’t need to? The answer must be that there are rewards from learning to explore other languages that far outweigh the initial difficulties. Language teaching certainly needs a vigorous overhaul. As a product of the old system of learning languages in school I can read in more than one other European language but my speaking skills are distinctly below par. Given that the growing political and economic influence of the European Union has not been matched by cultural sharing, the need to cross the linguistic and cultural divide is more and more pressing. It is no easier to find continental European books or newspapers in British high streets than it was a decade ago. We are still an island…