Karly

There is something devastating about watching the thing you love lose value in real time. Not in a dramatic, headline-grabbing way, but quietly, slowly, year after year, until what once felt vibrant and essential is seen as irrelevant or inconvenient. That is what it feels like to witness the disappearance of language degrees in the UK, not just as a linguist or a bilingual person, but as someone who genuinely believes that language is the closest thing we have to magic. And in this moment, it feels like the UK is choosing to extinguish that magic for good.

In 2024, just under three percent of all A-level entries in England were for modern or classical languages. That means fewer than one in thirty students chose to study French, Spanish, German, Latin, Irish or Welsh. More students sat A-level exams in Physical Education than in any of those languages combined. University departments are closing, teacher recruitment is in crisis, and many of the remaining programmes are being quietly absorbed, restructured or defunded until they barely resemble the robust degrees they once were.

If you are someone who loves language, this is not just a disappointing trend. It is a cultural emergency. And it is not just happening in Britain.

“¿Y eso para qué te va a servir?”

I am from Mexico, a country where speaking more than one language can be seen as either a sign of private school privilege or a survival skill, depending on who you ask. Either way, there is a deeply ingrained scepticism around language as a formal academic subject. If I had a peso for every time someone asked what I planned to do with a language degree, I would not need to work at all. The underlying message was always the same: this is not a real career. This is not a stable path. If you study languages, you will starve. Everything can be translated these days, they say. There is an app for that. Why waste your time?

But I studied them anyway. Not just English and Spanish, which were the two languages of my childhood, but language itself. How it functions. How it fails. How it reveals everything and conceals even more. My fascination became a discipline. That discipline became a degree. And eventually, that degree took me to Scotland, where I pursued a postgraduate degree in English Language at the University of Edinburgh, thinking that perhaps in the UK, language would be taken seriously.

I was wrong.

The British Language Crisis

The crisis facing modern languages in the UK is not a new phenomenon. It began in earnest in 2004, when the government removed the requirement for students to study a foreign language up to age sixteen. That decision triggered a dramatic decline in uptake, which never truly recovered. In the years that followed, languages were squeezed out of school timetables, framed as too difficult to yield high grades, and increasingly perceived as irrelevant in a world where English dominates the internet, the corporate world and the diplomatic sphere.

University applications followed the same downward trend. Between 2014 and 2024, more than two dozen university language departments closed across the UK. Others, such as Cardiff and Aberdeen, considered major cuts, citing low enrollment and budget pressures. Teacher recruitment in modern languages continues to fall well below government targets, and fewer than half of secondary schools in disadvantaged areas now offer a robust modern foreign language curriculum.

In some cases, universities are attempting to collaborate across regions, sharing teaching loads or exploring digital tools to keep low-enrolment languages alive. These initiatives are clever, but they are also desperate. They are signs of a sector trying to survive, rather than being supported to thrive.

What They Think We’re Doing

Sometimes I wonder if, deep down, the UK sees language degrees the way Mexico does. Not as something pursued out of academic rigour or cultural responsibility, but as a sort of aesthetic detour. A luxury for the indecisive. A placeholder for the privileged. A degree you choose because you have to go to university, and language feels safer than maths or more romantic than economics. There is a quiet assumption that you study languages when you are bored, when you are imaginative, when you dream of yourself having professional conversations in German or gossiping with older women in Tuscany who call you bella and mean it. When you picture yourself reading a novel in the original French, or saying grazie at the market and making it sound like music.

And yes, maybe we do study languages for those reasons too. Maybe we want to connect. Maybe we believe in stories. Maybe we want to be understood, not just literally, but deeply. But that does not make our degree unserious. That makes it essential.

There is something so intimate about learning a language that people underestimate. It is not about perfection. It is about persistence. It is about learning to fail with grace. It is about daring to speak before you feel ready, and staying present while your thoughts crawl toward fluency. It is about vulnerability. It is about trust. It is about imagining a version of yourself who can think differently, and then building it, word by word.

So when people say language degrees are for people who do not know what they are doing with their lives, I want to ask them if they have ever tried to listen to someone in a language they do not fully know, and still understood them. If they have ever been called mi amor or darling or mon ange by someone whose language is not their own. Because if they had, they would not dismiss this. They would realise what it costs, and what it gives.

The Cost of Monolingualism

The decline in language degrees is not just a failure of academic policy. It is a reflection of national attitude. In the UK, there is an unspoken belief that English is enough. It is the language of business, of science, of culture. If others want to engage with you, they can meet you in your mother tongue. The idea that you might meet them in theirs, not out of obligation, but out of curiosity or courtesy, is seen as unnecessary.

But monolingualism has a cost. It narrows perspective. It limits empathy. It makes diplomacy harder, trade slower, and cross-cultural relationships more fragile. It teaches students to view the world through a single lens, and to expect the world to accommodate them in return. And it is worth asking: is that really the kind of education we want to be offering? Is that really the kind of citizen we want to be producing?

Why It Still Matters

Language is not just a means of communication. It is a way of organising the world. A way of perceiving and feeling and thinking. When we study a new language, we are not just learning vocabulary. We are learning rhythm. Logic. Pattern. We are learning what a culture values, what it fears, what it finds beautiful. We are learning where the silences fall and what cannot be translated.

And all of this still matters. It matters in politics. It matters in art. It matters in how we understand others and how we understand ourselves.

When I think about what it means to study language, to really study it, not just for a term or an exam but as a lifelong engagement, I think about how hard it is. I think about all the moments I have doubted myself, stumbled over irregular verbs, mispronounced vowels, translated something too literally and been gently corrected by someone who had the grace to believe I was trying. And I think about how, every single time, I walked away with more than I arrived with. A better sentence. A better metaphor. A better ear.

A Future Worth Speaking Into

The future of language degrees in the UK is not guaranteed. That much is clear. But if we care about culture, if we care about equity, if we care about education that builds bridges rather than walls, then we have to care about this.

We have to fund the departments. We have to train the teachers. We have to stop asking students to justify their interest in the very thing that makes them more open, more empathetic, more capable of seeing beyond the boundaries of their own experience.

Language is not just something we speak. It is something we inherit. Something we grow into. Something we pass down. And if we lose the ability to study it, we do not just lose a skill. We lose a future we have not yet learned how to imagine.