A Point of View

"The British have never had much of a taste for learning foreign languages and as English becomes Europe's lingua franca, that stubbornness is starting to pay off. But if everyone else can speak English, what does that mean for our sense of identity?" questions BBC's Lisa Jardine. Richard Bradford from Cactus Language gives his point of view:

The all-pervading perception that we Brits ”don't need another language is arguably another example of our need to perpetuate our sense of self-importance and superiority over fellow Europeans, borne of centuries of Empire.

It is only by clinging desperately to the English language that can we maintain any advantage over our cross-channel counterparts, and patronisingly praise or criticise their ability to communicate in “our language.

Also, English might well be used as a lingua franca, but not in the way we think. The English spoken between non-native speakers is used genuinely as a tool for communication across cultures and nations. Place a native English speaker in a room full of European speakers of English, and that person will slow the proceedings with her/his overcomplicated use of language and futile phrasal verbs.

And the attitude we seem to have that we can learn a language later in life if we need to is flawed. Linguistic procrastination is rife in this country. Childhood is obviously the best time to pick up language skills, but as children, what we learn and retain through schooling will what we see being used around us by our parents and peers. Such that our own adult refusal to fully get to grips with other languages is almost guaranteed to be the way of our progeny.

Learning languages later in life can be time consuming precisely when we don’t have time. So instead of getting to grips with the basics at school, we spend our money on CDs and DVDs with their perverse guarantees of rapid fluency and then place excessive expectations on their abilities to deliver.

Thankfully, some organisations provide genuine solutions for late learners by fitting in proper language learning in the form of language holidays and tailor-made home and office language tuition.

Richard Bradford