A QUESTION OF LANGUAGE
March 17, 2010
A conversation last week with a senior diplomat made me think about language skills - or more to the point, the relative lack of them - in the UK. I generalise, of course. I know lots of people who work in our industry and can speak other languages. Nonetheless, our industry is one of the most internationalised but it is also one in which English is the dominant language, at least in the western world.
In countries where the first language is not English, there is an expectation and a desire to learn at least one other language (usually, but not always, English). In business it is routinely seen as an important addition to anyone's c.v. and in business education, courses combined with English attract more interest than those that do not have a language component. In the UK, building a foreign language into a course reduces, not increases, take up. Away from the world of work, English is common in much of popular culture. It has become the most universal second language.
Meanwhile we in the UK remain monoglot to a large extent, able to muster a bit of holiday French or Spanish, but not enough to use in the business environment. Our education system does its best, with compulsory language classes up to Standard Grade level here in Scotland, but there are limits to what can be achieved in a classroom.
Without a strong incentive it is difficult to persuade ourselves or our children to learn another language and to keep it up. We don't have that regular exposure to another language that non-English speakers often have through music, TV, film and new media.
I believe the UK is, by default, handing to others a competitive advantage. If our competitors can do all that we can and they can speak another language, we are by definition less capable than they are. We may feel we make up for it in other ways, or we may feel that if English is the universal language, we can rely on others' efforts to learn our language; and occupy the bit of our brains that would be required to learn theirs, with improving our capacities in other areas. But I don't think this is how the world works. I worry that we are missing out, in ways not easily appreciated or reflected in business metrics. In particular, as the world becomes increasingly connected, communicating across cultures and languages will become more important. But unlike the US, where Spanish is now very widely spoken (albeit due on the whole to inward migration), we may become marooned on our monoglot island, victims of the export success of our own language.
SFE is at the early stages of discussions with one of our universities on researching the importance of language skills in our industry. Maybe that will tell us whether I am worrying unnecessarily.
Owen
