The Linguist is a languages magazine for professional linguists, translators, interpreters, language professionals, language teachers, trainers, students and academics with articles on translation, interpreting, business, government, technology
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FEATURES THE STORY BEGINS A train carries coal across the FrenchLuxembourg border, facilitated by the European Coal and Steel Community staff. Despite much talk about global markets, French and German are still the languages most in demand. Interestingly, figures suggest that more than 70 percent of the UK's trade with non-English-speaking countries is conducted in English. Fine if you are buying and others are selling, since they are making the extra effort. But what if you are trying to export? Is the UK's deficit in some measure an indication of our inability to produce and employ enough good language graduates? But there is a golden lining to this © EUROPEAN UNION 2011 PE-EP otherwise depressing story. Language graduates do earn more than most other to recruit native English speakers. The UK graduates. Of all the SIV subjects – those that represents about 12 percent of the EU are strategically important and vulnerable, population, but only 6 percent of its staff. That according to the Government – language figure is unlikely to grow in the next few years. graduates do best in the pay stakes. They Only 1.5 percent of those applying to the EU earn more than engineers, physicists, for work last year were British. Applicants mathematicians and chemists. Perhaps that is have to be fluent in a European language a message to promote more boldly. In other than their mother tongue, preferably in addition, we are becoming less monolingual two other languages, so relatively few of the as a nation, in large measure because of notoriously monolingual Brits have a chance. multilingual immigration. Messieurs les anglais, nuls points. What next? An uphill battle The Government has an uphill battle if it is to improve the situation any time soon, as university languages departments continue to close and increasingly fewer pupils are taking languages at A-level. As regards smoothing the path for high-fliers to get to Brussels, the Government has blown hot and cold, rather as the political wind in different parties has changed. On cost grounds, it axed the dozen or so bursaries for outstanding graduates to attend the College of Europe in Bruges, seen as the royal road to a career in the European civil service. It also briefly shelved the 'fast stream' entry in the domestic civil service, only to reinstate it when it saw the quality of graduate recruits drop sharply. Now it realises the seriousness of the problem and is trying to tackle it, in particular by encouraging language learning by new recruits. Business has been more consistent. More than a third of big companies include knowledge of a modern foreign language among their criteria for selecting graduate Vol/52 No/6 2013 If we focus on the EU again, we can sense the important changes that globalisation has brought there. It is not as if the outside world has stood still while Europe has evolved. On the contrary, the pace of European integration has been determined in many ways by global events. The Cold War helped consolidate the European Communities and secure the Single Market. The Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 opened the way to a transformational enlargement; the European Single Market grew to more than 500 million people. Globalisation of trade and finance have also had their impact, as has the banking and sovereign debt crisis. What began as a regional integration project now takes its place in a global pattern of 'big powers', alongside America, Japan and the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). Globalisation is mirrored in the use of different languages on the internet, where the dominance of English has diminished to such an extent that, by 2009, less than 50 percent of posts online were in the language. This all adds credence to the argument that language teaching in the UK should shift away from the traditional French, German, Spanish and Italian to embrace Mandarin, Russian, Hindi, Urdu, Japanese and Arabic, the lingua franca of our most problematic neighbours. If we continue to teach European languages, then perhaps we should include Portuguese because of Brazil, or concentrate on Spanish because of its role in the United Nations. Some argue that British people are uniquely spared the problem of learning another regional language because all their European neighbours now speak English. This parallels the Foreign Secretary's insistence that we develop greater trade relations with the world outside Europe, since the Single Market is a 'given' for the UK. I do not agree that these are exclusive or opposites. My argument is more inclusive. The dominance of English as a working language in Brussels brings us many advantages, but it also leads us into complacency about the need to teach and learn modern European languages. They have a vital cultural value; they are part of our shared heritage in this continent. And they have economic value, since they are the mother tongues of the people with whom we do most of our trade. Although the use of English is widespread outside Europe, there is no one language that is dominant. We should build on the linguistic strengths that recent immigration has brought to the UK, giving us an unprecedented bank of global languages within our own population. We need more linguists using both European and world languages, and we need them quickly. The divine curse that stopped the building of the Tower of Babel was not such a disaster after all. We should not regret the fact that English is not the sole lingua franca. The multilingual 'curse' has increased the need for Anglophones to learn other languages. In doing so it has opened the perspective for us to harvest cultural and economic riches beyond compare. Who better than the Chartered Institute of Linguists to promote that message? This is a shortened version of the Threlford Memorial Lecture delivered by Dr Martyn Bond at Members' Day 2013 on 5 October. For a review of the event, see page 7. DECEMBER 2013/JANUARY 2014 The Linguist 11