What will Brexit mean for learning languages in the UK?
Though Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall has been translated into over thirty languages, the continued success of the trilogy in Britain remains the most telling indication of the nature of its appeal. Its central protagonist, the Tudor lawyer and political mastermind Thomas Cromwell, is as English as a dusty Tudor textbook. Yet he is also promiscuously foreign, slipping easily between English and Italian, Flemish, German, French and other tongues in his dance with courtly intrigue.
The multilingualism of Thomas Cromwell – the 16th-century smith’s boy from Putney – is a skill today’s world seems to have lost. In its most recent report on foreign language proficiency in Europe, the Higher Education Policy Institute placed the UK well at the bottom. Only 32% of Britons say they can read and write in another language, compared with 79% in France and 90% in Germany.
The story of Britain’s abysmal foreign language record “long pre-dates Brexit”, according to Professor Neil Kenny FBA, a languages expert at the University of Oxford and Languages Lead at the British Academy. The big mistake was made in 2004, when the Blair government scrapped mandatory foreign language education at GCSE level to encourage schools to better tailor “learning outcomes” to pupil ability. The decision saw GCSE intakes for French and German plummet.
The same year, the government committed to a 50% undergraduate entrance rate. Ironically, even at university level there has been at least a 54% drop in foreign languages uptake since 2008.
That said, more opportunities are now available to learn a foreign language, and the diversity of options is increasing. The number of higher education institutions teaching Chinese rose six fold between 2001 and 2016; while numbers learning Arabic and Portuguese have somewhat compensated for the downtick in the traditional options.
Yet the contours of opportunity run parallel to prevailing class and social divisions in modern Britain. “The decline has been sharpest in the state sector”, says Kenny. The division runs regionally (between north and south), and across gender, with girls outperforming boys consistently at language learning.
Aside from policy, however, what went wrong with Britain’s capacity for cultural exchange? The answer has a lot to do with what went “right”. Centuries of colonial history extended the reach of English across the globe and now – from West Indian patois to Singlish – that legacy has come back to bite. The relative economy and flexibility of English, a language free from gender, complicated verbal constructions and tongue-twisting syntaxes, gives foreigners a comparative advantage over the Brits when learning what has now become, in the words of Germany’s former EU Commissioner Guenther Oettinger, the “world language which we all accept.”
As the country takes a new path after Brexit, language has become a battleground. “If the UK government is serious about their ambitions for a Global Britain, we must upskill our graduates with the linguistic and cultural understanding to shape an outward-looking, post-COVID and post-Brexit UK,” said Vivienne Stern, Director of Universities UK International, in an urgent report by the British Academy in July. The Erasmus scheme – named after Cromwell’s contemporary and colleague – is to be replaced, the government says, by the UK’s own universities exchange program.
Britain’s rediscovery of foreign languages after Brexit, however, will surely have to amount to more than a tool of foreign policy or an economic ploy. Dr Dave Evans, a Fellow of Education at Liverpool Hope University and author of Language and Identity, evokes the importance of the French theorist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “social capital” in the learning of other languages. “Our use of words reflects who we are and the positions we hold,” he explains. “If one learns a foreign language, one does more than learn phonemes or phonetic sounds… cultural identity lives in the language. One assumes a different identity.”
The language issue is truly, to lift from Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s recent comment, “a fight for the soul of the nation.” Does Brexit Britain signal the triumph of a certain national xenophobia, an outlook on European languages captured in the image of a trip to the chippy on the Playa des Ingles, and an anxious muttering of “deux biers, s’il-vous plait”?
There is also the struggle for recognition of regional languages assuming political overtones – notably in Scotland, where Gaelic has found its way onto police cars as well as road signage; and Northern Ireland, where a debate continues about the status of Irish.
Language, culture, politics: the interplay between them is still recognisable from Cromwell’s time. But as Britain enters a new relationship with the world, it must reconsider the importance of multilingualism. The world of foreign intrigue is as familiar to today’s world as it was to Cromwell’s. It is not, yet, a world we have lost – but we need the language to understand it.