Learning a new language is an arduous pursuit, a years-long process of self-inflicted misery. Anyone who has struggled – under the severe gaze of an unforgiving Latin master – to locate the third-declension ablative in front of the class will know this. Sweaty hands and a shortness of breath are customary in the school’s language department: French is hard to spell; German replete with vocabulary totally alien to the English speaker; the Irish modh coinníollach enough to inspire dread in the hardest of constitutions.
And yet, picking up a new language is perhaps the most rewarding intellectual pursuit available to us. It provides us with an incalculable advantage over monolinguists, in spite of techno-optimism about the future of artificial intelligence translation tools. It demonstrates an openness and curiosity to the world beyond our noses. It aids clear and structured thinking, but more than that it generates cross-border empathy too.
Any outward-looking nation ought to be happy for its students to suffer minor discomfort in the French classroom in exchange for a vibrant population of polyglots.
With this in mind, the precipitous drop in British students studying languages at school begins to look like a severe policy failure. Students taking German at A-level have fallen from nearly 4,000 in 2013 to just over 2,000 in 2023. Those studying French at A-level have nearly halved too over the same time period. Modern languages are in crisis in the United Kingdom – and it will take a serious effort to fight against these social tides.
With improvement in translation models and greater emphasis offered to Stem subjects, the decline in language learning at school is one of the less surprising trends of the 21st century.
We should be careful about where we attribute the source of this problem. Ireland is too quick to ascribe every malady in the UK to Brexit, to chalk up the island as one teeming with Little Englanders, fearful of cosmopolitanism, happier to navel-gaze than to pick up a German dictionary. This is an obviously uncharitable characterisation.
In fact, this downward trend was set in motion long before 2016, with a glut of pupils abandoning languages in the 1990s. In 2004 it became no longer compulsory to study a language up to GCSE (Junior Certificate equivalent). The consequences of dropping that policy has been a disaster: language departments emptied, privately-educated girls becoming over-represented in the discipline. Now, receiving a good linguistic training has become more and more the preserve of a narrow elite.
This is not a phenomenon localised to the UK, but epidemic across the English-speaking world. In just three years from 2013 to 2016, colleges across the United States slashed 651 foreign-language programmes.
Success story
In contrast, Ireland’s approach looks like a rare success story, an exception to prove the rule. There is plenty to bemoan about the structure of the Leaving Certificate: it does not demand much creativity or original thought of its students; it elevates rote-learning over the cultivation of critical and analytical minds; it is predictable, undynamic and frankly boring. But it is certainly right about one thing: the obvious emphasis paid to modern languages.
Ireland is not immune to global trend cycles. From 2015 to 2020 the number of foreign-language students fell by about 5 per cent for boys and 3 per cent for girls. But this is a far less vertiginous drop than in the UK over a similar time frame. And more than that – students taking a foreign language other than French (historically the most popular) grew by 8 per cent from 2015-2019, as students look beyond the European Union and take up Russian, Japanese and Arabic.
As Ireland fashions itself as an outward-looking country, no longer slavishly reliant on the UK, this kind of data should be cause for optimism. Because learning a language at school is not just a question of facilitating easier communication with foreigners (important, though that is).
Rather, pulling focus on to language departments is a statement of intent about a nation’s direction of travel. It is hard to claim the mantle of global Britain, for example, while overseeing a fast-diminishing pool of bilinguals.
Meanwhile, America First seems an even more potent political force in the US when we realise the extent to which higher-level learning institutions are abandoning their foreign language programmes. Learning a language has personal practical benefits. But for society writ large it is a symbolic issue.
Languages are hard and require long-term dedication. And for what kind of return on investment? As we experience this particular leg of the technological revolution, perhaps it is easy to understand why students do not want to toil away with past participles and vocabulary tests. Google Translate and ChatGPT can do the heavy lifting for them.
But this mode of thinking is not just spiritually bereft. It also fails to understand what learning a new tongue is for: a mode of adopting the thoughts and head space of people unlike us; a way to empathise with other styles of communication; a route to understanding worlds otherwise alien to us. Google Translate is convenient but it will never get us there.
This is a success story of Irish education policy. And a trend the UK should seek to reverse. To better engage with the world – as was the foundational hope of so-called Global Britain – the UK needs to look closer to home.