Does it matter if we only speak English?
| The ability to speak a second language is in steep decline. But does it matter? After all, English is now the lingua franca, spoken widely from Berlin to Beijing, Paris to Tokyo, not to mention New York and Sydney. That seems to be what the British now think: they are voting with their tongues, no longer embarrassed by being monolingual. It has always been the same, but now it is even more the case. |  |
We ought to feel extremely uncomfortable about this. We are happy to boast about being a country with a strong sense of the global, about London being one of the world’s great global cities. Our leaders increasingly see fit to lecture the ethnic minorities on the need to integrate, including of course the need to speak English. What about the need, though, for Britain to integrate with the rest of the world? It is not good enough to expect everyone else to speak English: at root it remains a deeply arrogant attitude. Far from demonstrating our worldliness it is testimony to our parochialism. Earlier this week, the IPPR published a very interesting report about the growing numbers of British now living abroad. The most popular destinations by far remain the English-speaking countries, but even when they go to Spain, for example, the failure of the vast majority to integrate – especially their failure to learn Spanish – remains striking.
search for : speak English, English-speaking countries
