Those who know better in Britain are deeply concerned over the the fact that hardly anyone still bothers with learning foreign languages. Even some of the more reputable universities have shut down their language departments.
What the latest rounds of A-level and GCSE exams have shown is that children in Britain are no longer learning foreign languages. To read how bad the situation has got, see here, here or here.
This creates quite a mess. For starters, with a population that is increasingly monolingual (and not even that, really), businesses will have to rely even more on immigrants to fill jobs that require language skills. At the EU, too, Britain is woefully underrepresented, because British candidates for positions in Brussels cannot meet the language requirements.
Almost every article I have seen on this problem lately has included the following quote, so I’ll do the same:
“Whoever is not acquainted with languages knows nothing of his own.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Indeed, and I’ll argue, therefore, that there is no such thing as a monolingual person, because anyone who doesn’t speak a second language knows precious little about his/her own mother tongue, which means that they cannot function at 100 per cent and are, thus, alingual. Since I have been at least bilingual all my life, I cannot even begin to imagine what a miserable existence it must be not to have perfect command of even a single language. I pity such dysfunctional beings.
