Karly

I have spent an unreasonable amount of my life learning languages. I studied German and Italian at university, alongside linguistics, after already learning English and French, spent a summer studying in Germany, have since flirted with various other languages with varying degrees of commitment and, perhaps most importantly, have built enough of my life around language to become deeply annoying whenever somebody suggests that learning one is unnecessary because “everyone speaks English anyway.” Unfortunately, I have bad news for you: they don’t, and treating the existence of English as a lingua franca as though it has rendered every other language optional is a particularly effective way of making the world much smaller than it actually is.

I have worse news, too, because at a time when communicating across borders has technically never been easier, language learning seems increasingly to be treated as something quaint, difficult and ultimately expendable. Language departments are shrinking, degree programmes are disappearing and student numbers are falling, with universities responding to declining demand by cutting provision, which makes studying languages less accessible, which contributes to declining demand, which makes further cuts easier to justify, until everybody involved can stand around looking surprised that nobody is studying a subject we have spent years quietly dismantling.

Recently, I found out that the University of Edinburgh is cutting dozens of language courses as part of its wider restructuring, and at roughly the same time I learnt that the undergraduate programme where I studied languages apparently has only three new students. Three students entering a programme built around subjects that allow us to communicate with enormous portions of the planet feels almost absurd, and perhaps I’m biased, which I absolutely am, but I also think we’ve become strangely comfortable with the idea that languages are an optional cultural accessory rather than one of the fundamental ways human beings gain access to one another.

The usual defence of language learning tends to be painfully utilitarian. Languages are good for your CV, employers like them, they might increase your salary, they’re useful if you want to work abroad and you can put “professional working proficiency” on LinkedIn and feel accomplished about it, all of which may be true, but if the only way we can defend an entire field of study is by proving that somebody might eventually monetise it, we’ve already accepted a rather bleak premise about what education is for. There are things worth knowing because knowing them makes your world larger, and I’d argue that being able to understand another human being in the language they actually use is fairly high on that list.

A language gives you access to people you couldn’t otherwise speak to, obviously, but it also gives you access to humour, literature, journalism, history, music, film, politics, idioms, arguments, terrible jokes and ways of organising thought that don’t arrive in quite the same shape once somebody else has carried them across for you. Translation is extraordinary and I will defend translators until I die, but the existence of translation is not evidence that learning languages has become unnecessary any more than the existence of restaurants proves nobody needs to know how to cook.

Every translation is also a choice because somebody decides which books are worth translating, which news stories deserve international attention, which films receive subtitles, which interviews are reproduced elsewhere and which voices are considered important enough to cross a linguistic border. If you only consume material available in a language you already speak, then, you aren’t accessing the whole world through translation, you’re accessing the portion of the world somebody has chosen to translate for you, and I think that distinction matters considerably when we talk about whether learning other languages is still necessary.

English speakers are particularly good at forgetting this because English currently occupies an extraordinarily privileged international position. You can travel extensively using it, conduct business in it, study in it, consume enormous quantities of entertainment in it and find people willing or able to accommodate you in it, which makes it very easy to mistake linguistic privilege for linguistic universality, when “everyone speaks English” often really means “enough people in the places I personally go speak enough English for me not to experience inconvenience.”

There’s also something slightly depressing about imagining the logical conclusion of this attitude because we have access to more information than any generation before us, much of it instantaneously, while simultaneously becoming increasingly dependent on a handful of platforms, algorithms and dominant languages to decide what reaches us. If language education continues to contract, we risk becoming technically more connected while culturally more enclosed, able to watch events unfold anywhere in the world within seconds but increasingly reliant on somebody else to tell us what the people involved actually said, because however sophisticated our technology becomes, real life has no subtitles.

Yes, technology is getting better, machine translation is astonishing compared with what it could do even a decade ago and I will happily point my phone at a menu when confronted with a word I don’t know because I’m a linguist, not a martyr. None of this changes the fact that communication involves considerably more than replacing one word with another, because languages contain register, politeness, social relationships, ambiguity, cultural references, humour, implication, rhythm and enormous amounts of information that depend on context.

Anyone who has ever tried to explain why a joke is funny in another language knows the particular horror of reaching the end of a five-minute cultural explanation only to realise that you have successfully performed an autopsy on the joke and everybody involved now wishes you hadn’t bothered. Technology can help us cross linguistic barriers, and that’s wonderful, but using a tool to access a language isn’t the same experience as understanding it, because there is a difference between receiving the approximate propositional content of what somebody has said and hearing the precise word they chose, noticing that they changed register, understanding why everybody laughed or recognising that their perfectly polite sentence was, in fact, absolutely vicious.

The loss of language education also means losing the opportunity to become comfortable with not understanding everything immediately, which might be one of its most underrated benefits. Learning a language requires you to tolerate ambiguity, make ridiculous mistakes, listen when you only understand half of what’s being said and accept that another person possesses knowledge you don’t, all while slowly discovering that the way your own language divides up reality isn’t inevitable, and there’s something deeply humbling about repeatedly being reminded that your own way of communicating is only one possibility among thousands.

The first time you learn that another language makes a distinction yours doesn’t, or doesn’t make one you had assumed was universal, you’re forced to confront the fact that your linguistic habits are exactly that: habits. Your way of saying something isn’t simply the natural way human beings say it, and your language isn’t a transparent window onto reality through which everybody else is viewing approximately the same scene with different labels attached.

This is one reason the decline of language study worries me beyond the immediate fate of university departments. If fewer people seriously engage with languages other than their own, we don’t simply lose a practical skill, we lose one of the most accessible forms of sustained contact with difference, and at a moment when so much of our digital lives is designed to feed us material based on what we already like, already understand and already agree with, I’m not convinced we need fewer reasons to step outside our own linguistic worlds.

There is an irony here because young people are hardly uninterested in cultures beyond their own. We watch Korean television, listen to Latin American music, follow Japanese fashion, read translated fiction, travel constantly and form friendships online with people thousands of miles away, while the institutional structures that once encouraged people to learn the languages attached to those cultures are increasingly struggling to persuade us that doing so is worth the effort.

Perhaps part of the problem is that language learning has been sold badly because we turned it into conjugation tables, vocabulary tests and the promise that one day you might need to ask where the train station is, then seemed bewildered when students decided an app could probably handle that. If the argument for learning French is that you need to know how to order a croissant, Google Translate has already won, whereas the better argument is that French gives you access to French, to the people who speak it and to everything they have decided to do with it.

That doesn’t simply mean France, either, because languages refuse to respect the tidy national borders language textbooks like to draw around them. French gives you access to people and cultures across multiple continents, Spanish extends far beyond Spain, Portuguese is not simply Portugal, English certainly doesn’t belong exclusively to England and every major language contains communities whose histories, identities and varieties complicate the neat little flag we tend to put beside it in a dropdown menu.

Language education at its best teaches precisely this complexity because it teaches us that there is no single Spanish, no single English, no culturally neutral way of speaking and no language detached from the people who use it. This makes the disappearance of language programmes particularly sad because what we lose isn’t merely instruction in grammar and vocabulary, we lose spaces dedicated to understanding how other people speak, write, think, create and make meaning.

I don’t think everybody needs a degree in languages, nor do I think everyone needs to spend years becoming perfectly fluent in several of them, because fluency itself is often treated as such an intimidating finish line that people decide there’s no point beginning unless they can eventually arrive there. Knowing some of another language is still infinitely more access than knowing none, and one of the worst things we’ve done to language learning is convince people that anything short of effortless fluency somehow doesn’t count.

What I do think is dangerous is allowing language learning to become so marginal that monolingualism begins to feel like the obvious default and everything else like an eccentric extracurricular activity. Languages aren’t decorative additions to an education, and they certainly aren’t obsolete simply because a machine can increasingly mediate interactions for us, because the world isn’t becoming less multilingual just because some of us have become less willing to learn its languages.

People are still falling in love, arguing, writing novels, making jokes, campaigning, gossiping, singing, complaining about their neighbours and telling stories in thousands of languages every single day, whether we understand them or not. We can build increasingly sophisticated tools to translate that world for us, and I hope we do, but I don’t want to live permanently on the other side of the subtitle, so will someone PLEASE think of the languages?