Since the Labour government removed foreign languages from the core curriculum of British schools in 2004, the school authorities have determined that the British are less and less willing to learn a second language.
“That will harm Britain,” the poet and translator Michael Hofmann wrote in The Observer on August 16. “The so-called ‘world language,’ English, is spoken as a first language by just 7 percent of the world’s inhabitants. Languages are some of the oldest, deepest, most thoughtful human inventions. A disdain for, or a lack of interest in, all the others does not seem to me to be a civilized or even a tolerable state of affairs.
“Foreigners will go on learning English, regardless. The British have an obligation, it seems to me, to reciprocate. Call it what you like – mutuality, courtesy, fair exchange, good practice. Not to do so is in every sense hateful. A self-exemption…. A departure from international polity.”
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
Ezra Pound: “The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.”
Goethe: “Those who know nothing of foreign languages know nothing of their own.”
Charlemagne: “To know another language is to have a second soul.”
W. Somerset Maugham: “The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit.”
Speak to me only with thine eyes!
Canadians are lucky to have two official languages. The United States is almost as lucky to have lots of Hispanics. If the British ignore Arabic, for example (let alone EU languages), they will fail to defend their corner in life- or economy-threatening situations, as a result of having no inkling of how minds work in other key civilizations.
I’m finally beginning to regret not having taken up Her Majesty’s offer to teach me Chinese during National Service in the early ’60s. Now there’s a language and civilization we’d better tune in to accurately, or else!
For me – else.
Me, too, unfortunately (unless I open up my mind before it’s too late — I guess I’ll try “Chinese for Dummies”).
Of course, we have to learn foreign languages. It opens you up to other countries. Knowing English, the WORLD language is certainly helpful. Half the population in Los Angeles County speaks Spanish. The Spanish I learned is often not good enough to follow their conversation, but in my work my ability to speak Spanish helped me a lot. Most of my Spanish I learned when I went to school in Switzerland years ago. The professor (Consuelo Carrasco) was a refugee from the civil war in Spain. She had been a professor at the University of Malaga. She was a liberal, the Franco forces considered her a “Rojo” (Red).
Not to mention your esperanto.
The biblical reason for a polyglot human population is this: we all speak different languages so we can’t conspire together to build a tower that would reach Heaven (Tower of Babel) and to ensure that we spread out and populate the entire earth, rather than inhabiting just one small corner of the world, like gathering around the office water-cooler.
Dilemma: If we learn other languages so we can communicate with each other, are we messing with God’s plan? Is it hubris to be multilingual?
Personally, when it comes to other tongues, I’m no threat to Him.
I happen to know that Jehova doesn’t care whether he gets many votes in today’s multicultural society as long no one tries to buiild another Tower of Babel. The cardinal sin is hubris.
At a national level we have French and English as official languages for Canadians coast to coast.
Step closer to the ground, though, and there are a few more official languages in Canada: Chipewyan, Cree, Gwich’in, Inuinnaqtun, Inuktitut, Inuvialuktun, North Slavey, South Slavey and Dogrib in the NWT; and Inuktitut and Inuinnaqtun in Nunavut.
There are yet more Canadian languages, not tagged ‘official’. Add Haida to those listed here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Canada.
These languages are the sinews of North American cultures, as well as their expression. Happily, some of them are being revitalized, and embedded in social institutions generated by people who share the cultures. More should be. In the eloquence of Wade Davis’s 2009 Massey Lectures, they’re Wayfinders.
Even on the surface, each language is its own music. I love the sound of Inuktitut.
More deeply, each language embodies a way of understanding the natural world – using parts of it, while being with it as a whole. It’s something we’ll all need to get better at. Neither French nor English is well nuanced for this. (Can you find an ordinary English collective word for the elements of nature without calling them natural “resources”?)
In the Baldwin-Lafontaine lecture series, John Ralston Saul promotes the particularly Canadian anglophone and francophone culture of responsible government. In A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada, he also convinces me that a longer historical truth and potential chosen future for Canada is as a métis nation – a place of aboriginal and other cultures in conviviality, rather than a place of some cultures overpowered and assimilated by others.
By being made ‘official’, these other Canadian languages strengthen the ability of our governments to serve and respond to the people they are supposed to be responsible to.
Now I’m thinking of Haida Gwaii – the ‘Galapagos of the north’ – the astonishingly biodiverse, productive and beautiful waters and islands off the central BC coast. Ten months ago, in December 2009, the Council of the Haida Nation and the Government of BC signed the Kunst’aa Guu-Kunst’aayah Reconciliation Protocol (download here). And I’m imagining a pipeline from Fort McMurray through the Rockies to a proposed new mega port and oil tanker waypoints in those same navigationally-treacherous and vulnerable waters. It’s to carry big oil mined in Alberta by Chinese sovereign companies and multinationals to China, following private negotiations and public regulations – in English.
Looking outward, either with an eye to the main chance, or aiming to temper the new colonizers, I think I need to know Chinese.
Looking to who we are and who I’d like us to become, I think I need to know Cree or Haida or Inuktitut.
A most useful comment. My eyes were first opened by John Ralston Saul’s book – I only read the reviews but I got the point – but your formulation is just as persuasive – and more succinct. It should be part of every school’s curriculum.