Lesley Riddoch: Disdain for learning foreign languages and desire for everyone to speak English is holding the UK back

Published on Sunday 23 January 2011 12:21

News that more German students might be heading to Scotland has mercifully failed to produce the usual crop of weary war jokes.

The impending end of conscription and shorter mandatory schooling in Germany will produce more potential students than German university places this year - so some may try to come here.

Education minister Mike Russell is trying to close the funding loophole that makes Scottish higher education free to EU students - but there's another important issue.

What makes Germans so confident they can complete a degree-level course in a language that's not their Mither Tongue? That should be the jaw-dropper in the German students story. Young Germans speak a foreign language so well that the world is their oyster. Scots do not.

The latest figures show one in five Scottish secondary schools doesn't offer Higher German and one in ten doesn't offer Higher French. In a recent European Commission survey of non-mother-tongue skills, Britain came last out of 28 countries. More fool us, because language skills virtually guarantee jobs.

Statistics show UK language students are behind only lawyers, medics and vets in employability. Computer grads and media studies graduates lag well behind. Pupils, parents and schools are dumping German at the same time that German business is expanding everywhere.

Roughly one in 100 UK workers is employed by a German firm or export contract. But British workers are unlikely to get top jobs because they can't communicate with other head office staff back in Germany.

The European Parliament can't fill the UK's allocation of translator vacancies because not enough British applicants speak the required two foreign languages.

Language is a barrier for monoglot Britain in a way it patently isn't for millions of mainland polyglot Europeans. Our inability to take up jobs or study abroad makes a nonsense of the EU's founding principle - freedom of movement.

Of course, it's quite possible to study and do business in another country without becoming fluent in its language. I'm doing just that - a PhD jointly supervised by Strathclyde and Oslo Universities.

Thanks to BBC sitcoms imported for half a century with subtitles, most Norwegians are fluent English speakers. There was a time when all Nordics spoke fluent Swedish as the "family language". No longer. English is the modern Esperanto.

Native English speakers - like all Scots - are therefore living through an astonishing moment in world history. But strangely, despite the fact we can walk anywhere, speak English and expect to be understood, we aren't doing it. How perverse.Why are we staring evolution's gift horse in the mouth?

Why aren't unemployed Scots heading east not west to find jobs? Why aren't politicians seeking alternative economic and social models across the North Sea before falling hook, line and sinker for examples derived from easier-to-understand countries like Canada, the USA, Australia or New Zealand?

The first two are enormous federal nations. The second two exist in another hemisphere. And yet, because the "New World" was populated by our forebears we view them as family - and of course we can watch their films without subtitles and converse without (almost) any effort. By contrast there is still a cultural, social and emotional iron curtain across the North Sea and the English Channel.

Scots like to think we don't share the kneejerk antipathy to Europe of our English cousins. For those long years under the iron fist of Maggie Thatcher, Europe acted like a Big Brother to powerless Scotland - a source of funds when Westminster ran dry and a source of social democratic sanity amidst the monetary madness of our dismantled industrial world.

The majority of Scots instinctively back the idea of Europe. We just don't go there - except for weekend city breaks or beach-based holidays. Indeed, the small rise in Spanish learning probably reflects a desire to make more beer orders, than to transact with the world's important Latino heritage.

Ironically, the longer we let this situation continue, the harder it will be to retrieve. As fewer children learn economically useful foreign languages, fewer can become future language teachers. As more foreigners become fluent English speakers, fewer opportunities arise to learn their native tongues by local "immersion". A fellow Scot had to work in an Oslo old folk's home to meet people who couldn't lapse into perfect English at the first sound of his broken Norwegian.

So, you might conclude, why bother? Certainly, if we want to be trapped in our own culture and the physical confines of our own country, if we want to have the lowest paid jobs within successful European companies, if we want to be effectively barred from promotion, if we want to leave the administration of Europe to nations with better language skills, if we want to continue supplying more computer, hairdressing, media studies and digital photography graduates to the world than anyone could possibly ever need - we should go on just as we are.

Seventy-five per cent of the world's population do not speak English and the proportion of internet communication conducted in English almost halved between 2000 and 2009. Students, parents and politicians should know the consequences of ignoring these realities. In the European context, not learning German means not getting top jobs, not clinching contracts and not fully developing business links with the UK's third biggest export market and Europe's economic and cultural powerhouse.

EU Leader funding backs trans-national development projects. How many Scottish-inspired Leader projects involve French, Dutch or Belgian partners as a way to tick the EU partners box - and how many rely instead on the "safe" (but now bankrupt) English-speaking Irish? Weak language skills unconsciously shape our allegiances and our knowledge of international affairs.

On 27 March Baden-Wrttemberg looks set to make history. Full marks to anyone who knows the Greens may become the largest partner in the German land's coalition government, ousting Angela Merkel's CDU party from its traditional heartland.

We are quietly walling ourselves up inside our own language, mindset and culture at a time when the rest of the world is doing the opposite. Even Americans realise Spanish must now become an employment requirement as immigration changes the mix of their nation.

Britain is fast becoming the complacent monoglot in a multilingual world. Wha's like us? Damn few.