Is English as important a language as we think it is?
Every now and again, my ignorance is poked by a sharp stick. This email from The Big Word did just that. And not just the fact that only 11.11% of today’s youth speak English as their first language; the 3000 languages expected to become extinct is a terrifying statistic.
Language diversity is incredibly important to culture and social ‘richness’. But learning languages is also a vital component of our future prosperity. In the UK, there is a natural tendency to believe English is the only language we need to get by. Whereas in reality, this is far from the case. Our growth and future prosperity relies on exports (unlike most American businesses whose domestic market is big enough). And to compete effectively, business people must understand the cultural and linguistic context in which they operate and exchange
Unfortunately in the UK, people have lost sight of this and either don’t learn a language or demand to learn ones like Spanish at the expense of other more valuable languages like German or French. And the consequence is that those businesses for whom exports are important, have a poor supply of employees with the right language skills. The CBI survey of employers is clear about what languages are important today.
Source: CBI Education and Skills survey 2012.
For me the most striking exclusion is Portugese, specifically Brazilian Portugese, but what this list does give is a sense of which export markets are important to UK businesses today
So if you have children , do encourage them to learn a foreign language, preferably other than Spanish. They will be more valuable to employers, will contribute to our future prosperity and also enrich themselves at the same time.
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Over 75% of the world’s population speak no English at all – just to add to your statistics. English is now a major global lingua franca, used between non native speakers the world over in business. And that often lulls native speakers into a false sense of security about not needing other languages. BUT: the English they are speaking is not the English of London or New York or Sydney or… It is stripped of cultural context to become a vehicle for communication between non anglophone cultures. The techniques of speaking a second/foreign language are very different to the way we speak our mother tongue, unless we have learned other languages ourselves and can thus become aware of the challenges of ensuring mutual understanding. There is ample business evidence of speakers of English as a Global Language (aka Globish) communicating more effectively with each other than with mother tongue English speakers. In this country we need to wake up to the fact that we don’t speak Globish and are therefore at a disadvantage not an advantage through having English as our national language. The best way of learning to speak Globish is to develop our multilingual and cross-cultural skills through learning other languages.
As you have said, languages also enable intercultural understanding, vital to building business relationships. And even a few sentences can make a difference to how a potential client/business contact will perceive you.