The Linguist

@Linguist_CIOL JUNE/JULY The Linguist 27 INSTITUTE MATTERS sort of thing. And it's quite hard to pitch to parliamentarians because it's an eclectic audience. The House of Lords has some commonality; the House of Commons is much more unruly! So the line I've taken is that you are handicapped in many ways by not being able to speak another language because you can't understand your interlocutors and, in a way, you can't understand yourself, certainly as you appear in others' eyes. I also back up Baroness Coussins in the Lords on language-related matters, and bring the importance of languages into Lords debates on other matters. For me, the economic arguments for language learning are less important than the cultural ones. That is a bit simplistic, of course – you can't actually divide them like that, and I make a pragmatic economic argument where appropriate – but the true worth in knowing another language is that it expands the imagination and the cultural hinterland. There are so many things that you have no sense of unless you've managed to jump out of our little goldfish bowl to swim in the seas of other cultures. Can you share a golden languages moment in your life? I once preached in German to 130,000 people in Hamburg (live on television, too), and then two years later addressed an audience of 12,000 in Stuttgart with the now German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and the then UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan. My wife sometimes says, "Why do you say 'yes' to things that you later think, 'What have I signed myself up for?!'" When I was asked to do this triple header I felt a complete fraud. I'd upset David Cameron by writing him an open letter about Middle East foreign policy, which The Observer published on its front page, and the Germans couldn't understand how a bishop could have such impact on the political discourse. I had pneumonia in the run up to this event, and at the end I had to be taken to hospital. So when I said 'yes' to that I perhaps wasn't thinking at my best! I wasn't thinking, "You'll have to be able to operate in German on the same stage as two world leaders." It's German which opened all that up. It's a beautiful example! So if you had to persuade a young person to engage with languages what would you say? I'd say, would you like to experience life in black and white or in Technicolor? Because if you have a language, the colours open up before you and you'll see things you never expected to see. So what about your languages now? When I left GCHQ I wasn't able to travel for security reasons, so I didn't speak German for around 15 years, and Russian for at least 19. When I was finally allowed to travel, I went to Kazakhstan for a Global Interfaith Conference and gradually the Russian came back. But I'll never be fluent in Russian, while in the last six weeks I have done two academic conference papers in German, and I'm off preaching in May again in German. Would you say you've reached a level of comfort in German that you never achieved in Russian then, or is it more a case of deterioration for lack of practice? I think it's both. If you study more than one language, most of us have an affinity with one in particular, and for me that is German. It's the one with which I'm most comfortable – most at home if you like. I'm a plodder, not a great linguist; I've had to work at it. And when you learn a language very quickly and a few years later you're not using it, I think you lose it more quickly. Life in Technicolor In 2014, the Rt Revd Nicholas Baines became the first Bishop of Leeds and a member of the House of Lords. Before he was ordained, he worked for four years as a Russian linguist at GCHQ. Regularly preaching in German, he champions languages in the British media and parliament. In March, he was awarded CIOL's David Crystal Award for outstanding contribution to the field of languages. Twitter @nickbaines

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