Why Study Languages?

It`s a question that needs answering. The last decade has seen a sustained drop in the number of foreign language learners in the UK, both at secondary school level - where languages were made no longer compulsory in 2004 - and in universities, with only Mandarin showing increasing student numbers and all other languages in decline. Why, in our age of Google Translate and where the globalization of English continues to do away with language barriers, do language students in the UK stubbornly persist in a task which appears to be losing importance by the day?

In short, as English speakers, why do we even bother? After all, the facts show that English is the closest thing we have to a universal language, spoken in at least a hundred countries besides the United Kingdom. Even if Mandarin and Spanish rank higher in terms of their number of native speakers, they are spoken in only five and 20 countries respectively. But the ubiquity of English is useful for its speakers abroad but it can also act as a set of cultural blinkers. Once we accept the automatic domination of English over other languages we immediately become passive recipients of foreign culture in whichever translated form we receive it. Without knowledge of a country`s language we remain always at one remove from the culture in which we are supposedly immersed. In countries where freedom of speech is a given, this remains only a frustration; in a country such as China, where the government often exercises control over what visitors see, it can be a real problem. If you`ll excuse the geeky analogy, the process reminds me of the way in which Apple decides what people can and can`t view on their iPhones and iPads, and the great difference between the Internet as we have known it until now and their own sterilised version of it. Anyone with a decent grasp of a language has access to the masses of written and spoken material available to them, but a Japanese tourist in France, for example, is usually reduced to whatever the tour guide tells them. Thirst for deeper cultural enrichment must certainly be what drives many language students towards their goals, because good knowledge of a language is the only way we can be sure we're getting the real deal. But not all of us learn languages just to 'get closer to culture` - for many, they are simply tools that allow us to interact with a greater proportion of the world. When I asked an Italian businessman on a Polish language course the inevitable question `why Polish?`, he gave a nonchalant shrug and a one-word reply: Biznes. It later emerged that the word was actually an umbrella term which also included the seduction of Polish women. Whatever his real objectives, there was no yearning for cultural enlightenment there, simply the desire to acquire a skill and make use of it. And when languages become a practical necessity, they can lose their charm - ask any UK immigrant who has been forced to learn a decent level of English in order to pass the Home Office`s notorious British Citizenship test, and I`m sure they won`t be entirely positive about the learning experience. As a language student it is easy to fall into the trap of assuming that everyone enjoys learning languages on some level, and to forget that for many it is not even an active, conscious process but simply the result of being in a certain place and having to do certain things. Either way, learning any language is an achievement regardless of our reasons for doing so, and I don't want to argue here that the achievement of learning a language through necessity is in any way 'lesser' than that of learning for pleasure. Ultimately, though, the real language students for me are those who realise that there is always more to learn, that we are never fully masters of even our mother tongue, and then plough on doggedly anyway. They learn for the simple pleasure of recognising a single word after hours of learning vocabulary, and aren`t daunted by the notion that such lengthy study is necessary for those short but magic moments when all the jigsaw pieces fit seamlessly together, and knowledge accumulated over several years condenses into a single moment of comprehension. Courses offering to teach, say, `German in two weeks` are certainly appealing, but for what I'm calling a real language student they also miss the point. To borrow President Kennedy's valuable expression, we choose to face such challenges 'not because they are easy, but because they are hard'. For me this comparison with space exploration is not too much of an exaggeration: the universe of language is always expanding and will always need explorers. If you're travelling for the ride more than the destination, then what better journey to set out on?