Speaking English

The outbreak of hot war in Europe will be causing many assumptions to be reviewed in the "corridors of power" of the West, I'm sure [1], and many lessons will also be being learned, and steps taken, all "at pace", and whatever other clichés might be wheeled out for the occasion. But that "we" have become complacent is beyond dispute. That the hottest issue of the day until now, measured by heat generated rather than light cast, has not been poverty or even climate change but the debate – hardly the word – around the right of a tiny minority to choose a gender different from their biological sex and to insist on their chosen pronoun is surely indicative of some muddling of priorities, to put it mildly.

Listening to the radio, I am always aware of one particular variety of complacency. Notoriously, very few people in the English-speaking world bother (or are indeed offered the opportunity) to learn a foreign language; at least, to any degree of proficiency. The attitude has long been, why bother? God speaks English, and so should everyone else. And so they do, and with truly remarkable fluency. Yet hardly anyone seems to marvel at this fact, presumably for the same reason: being unable to speak any other language, and never having been required to learn one, many of us presume that being able to hold your own with some impatient journalist or to describe in vivid detail the terrible experience you have just been through is what "speaking English" means. We do it all the time, after all.

Now, by contemporary Anglosphere standards, I am unusually multilingual. I speak decent German, adequate French, poor Spanish and Russian, and should the Romans ever rock up on these shores again, I'll be well placed to monitor their communications [2]. But I listen to ordinary folk interviewed on the streets of the world, whether protesting, fleeing conflict, or opining on the topic du jour, and I despair. I could never match that level of fluency, that effortless width and depth of vocabulary, that command of idiomatic speech in any language other than my native tongue. It is shaming. How do they learn to speak such incredibly good English?

Once upon a time, of course, the need to run a worldwide empire meant that linguists were in demand in Britain, and ought to be today in the USA. Strictly monolingual people today read that so-and-so taught himself Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, or Pashto without blinking: well, of course he did. You would, wouldn't you? But this is to minimise the achievement: these are not easy languages to learn, and utterly different from European models. Even if you have to learn such languages, it's a tall order. Obviously, "immersion" in a culture is a far superior way to learn it than cracking open a grammar book and reciting irregular verbs. But immersion does not mean patrolling it armed to the teeth and kicking down doors. One of my father's favourite jokes, brought home from his six wartime years in various parts of the world, was this: Well, how hard can Hindi / Arabic / Burmese be? Even the kids over there can speak it! Well, it seems that now even the kids over there can speak our language, too.

This presumption of English as a lingua franca is both a measure of our complacency and a crucial vulnerability in a dangerous world where the bad guys can exploit the massively unfair advantage of speaking languages other than English. So where are genuinely fluent speakers of, say, Russian or the various dialects of Arabic and Chinese to be found? Probably not so many in the corridors of power, the ranks of the military and security services, the police, or the press, but almost certainly plenty in the plush offices of multinational companies. And they are most likely immigrant native speakers with perfect English as their second, third, or fourth language. Kids from over there, essentially.

In the days of National Service, the British Army used to select out potential linguists and put them through a famously effective Russian course. I was taught my (minimal) Russian by one such man, who became a history teacher at my secondary school. But, now that languages are not compulsorily taught in our state schools, and the armed forces are not supplied with a steady stream of the best and brightest, I imagine our troops on the ground have reverted to the tried and tested method of speaking English only LOUDER. Apparently the Army is belatedly aware of this as a problem (see this report from Cambridge University) but – like, say, racism – this is a systematic deficiency in the wider culture that good intentions and position papers cannot fix.

Meanwhile, I continue to listen with sympathy, admiration, and no little shame to ordinary Ukrainian citizens and young children driven from their homes by military aggression, describing in fluent, idiomatic English what they saw, what they experienced, and what they fear will happen next. It doesn't seem a stretch, does it, to conclude that there is a direct connection between their fate and our various sorts of complacency? Or that their investment in "western" values, embodied in their fluency in our linguistic dollar, has proved fairly worthless? As for us, never mind speaking Ukrainian, most of us couldn't point to the place on a map before last week.

1. But why do these people hang out in the corridors, I wonder? Are they short of proper rooms for meetings? Or does it help them feel like they don't really have an office job?

2. A level of attainment once regarded as unremarkable, and all learned (apart from Spanish) by attending a perfectly ordinary English state grammar school in the 1960s.