Michelle Rodger: Mind your language and watch your exports grow

Published on Saturday 23 August 2008 14:01

THERE'S a real opportunity for cunning linguists in business right now. Linguists, obviously for their ability to converse fluently in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, even proper English (a long-forgotten and much-abused language, in my view). And cunning, because the right language skills combined with a dash of entrepreneurialism could be the difference between a domestic business success and a global one.

Personally, I speak a lot of languages: a smattering of schoolgirl French ("Marie-Claire et Jean Paul jouant dans le jardin"); a little German ("Das ist doch nicht moglich", drummed into us by our teacher before a school trip to Berlin in anticipation of meeting German schoolboys); I speak Mum: "I won't ask you again, pick your underwear up off the floor," and I also speak Girlfriend: "I won't ask you again, pick your underwear up off the floor". Finally, I learned Journalese at the feet of masters: "My editor will sack me if I don't go back with an exclusive interview and a pic of your dead/maimed/lost child."

But seriously, we just don't pay enough attention to languages, both learning them and, more importantly, leveraging them, in this country.

What brought it home to me was an evening spent TV channel hopping. Bored with the lack of a new series of CSI and the end of Men In Trees, I meandered my way through hundreds of channels I wouldn't normally view. Most were hosted by English-speaking presenters, quizzing people from all over the world, most of whom could not only understand but could converse well in English. How many of us could have chatted away in Pashtun, or Hindi, or Urdu? Mandarin, Japanese or Arabic? Or even French, German or Spanish? Very few, I would imagine, yet the fact that these people could communicate effectively in our language was really quite humbling.

There is an unspoken, unwritten rule that English is the language of business. Who are we kidding? Did you know only 6% of the world's population speak English as a first language? Probably no more than 20% speak English at all. This smug "let them eat cake" approach to language is reflected historically in the lack of focus on learning languages in our education system; languages shouldn't be an optional extra, or considered the poor relations of the sciences, or technology. But that clearly has had a knock-on effect inthe workplace and the economy.

A recent British Chambers of Commerce survey found 80% of English exporters could not competently conduct business dealings overseas in even one foreign language. And the National Centre for Languages recently ranked Britain 27th out of 28 European countries in foreign language skills.

Work done by the Nuffield Foundation looked at British companies and ascertained one in three were losing money because they either didn't have staff speaking foreign languages or didn't really understand the culture of doing business in other countries. As far back as April 2005, a House of Lords committee warned UK businesses would be "severely hampered" because language skills are falling behind those in other countries.

And in 2007 a study – Tower of Babel – carried out by Cardiff University suggested language failures in business represent the equivalent of a 7% hidden tax, and estimated rebalancing UK trade to become less dependant on doing business in English could add 21bn annually to the economy. Considering 10% or so of that might accrue to Scotland, imagine the impact on the Scottish economy of an extra 2bn.

Our lack of language skills hides a fundamental problem with the balance of trade. Put simply, where English is the language of our customers, we sell more than we buy: in America we export 28.8m and import 22.8m; in the Republic of Ireland it's 12.2m and 9.9m; Australia is 2.29m out and 1.77m in.

But where the language of our customers is not English, we buy more than we are able to sell: with Germany it's 20.8m in exports but 33.6m in imports; in the Netherlands it's 13.5m v 16.6m; and in Italy, 8.6m compared with 11.4m.

You don't have to be a maths scholar to work out those sums. So why has business been so slow to recognise the vast opportunities to be harnessed? What on earth are we waiting for? It's already obvious to Germany, the Netherlands and Italy, so I would suggest we need to reveillez et sentez le caf.

The current Scottish Government has recognised the need to strengthen the focus on languages, and has introduced a Baccalaureate for Languages, designed to stretch our young students. The first awards will be made in 2010.

But is it really as simple as that? Improving language provision in schools? Surely French learned at school is fit for buying a burger at Euro Disney and school-taught Spanish would buy you an English breakfast or a Sunday roast in Torremolinos?

Tim Steward of The Language Network Scotland says learning a language at school opens the door to a much wider business opportunity than you would at first think.

With French, he says, you can do business in France, Vietnam, Africa and Canada. Learn Spanish and your market could suddenly open up to the 400 million potential customers in Latin America. And Germany is our biggest customer in the European market. Once you have learned a first foreign language, it's much easier to learn a second.

So with all the talk about lack of skills in this country, and global organisations upping sticks to cheaper and better skilled linguist-ridden countries, our focus should be on up-skilling and new-skilling our own workforce. And where better to start than with languages?