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Lingua franca

Languages are hard to learn. Even English, which seems so easy, has half a million words, weird grammar, and some odd pronunciations. When we try to learn a new language, we are thrust all the way back to early childhood. We gurgle inarticulately, we resort to sign language, sometimes we cry. Without the command of words, we feel helpless and ignorant.

Some people have the gift of tongues – we call them polyglots. That’s a Greek word but I failed to learn Greek at school due to tempelia or laziness. But for most of us, one language is enough. Judging by the things I see written on the web, one language can be too much. We are, for the most part, a nation of monoglots and demiglots.

It is all the more embarrassing to visit those countries where multiple languages are taken for granted, which actually means most of the countries in the world. I’ve been to many places where I couldn’t understand a word anybody said: Russia, Hungary, Greece, Scotland. It’s humiliating. When we travel, we get by with a few essential phrases learned from a book: please, thank you, how much, where’s the bathroom, I don’t understand speed limits in kilometers, and so on.

To complete the humiliation, the little phrase book is not necessary. We can simply speak English and usually be understood. How do they do it? These foreigners cheat, of course. The trick is called education. They sneakily introduce languages into the school curriculum at an early age and keep teaching them all the way up through college. Very few children escape this regime without a working knowledge of at least one foreign language, and most graduates have two. It is the downfall of the English-speaking nations that English has become almost a lingua franca (that’s Latin, another language I failed to learn), so we can stumble around the world in a cloud of ignorance, unable to read menus or the local newspaper, but without suffering any real inconvenience because English-speaking locals are always on hand to help. Why should we bother? We don’t, so foreign language teaching in our schools and colleges has all but collapsed.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Learning a second language may enrich your understanding of your own, but that’s no more than a mild intellectual pleasure. So, one argument for learning other languages is entirely selfish and personal. When you travel abroad, you feel and sound more like a citizen of the world and less like a helpless child.

But ignorance of languages is more than simply an embarrassment. When it comes to mutual understanding across national barriers, words are all we have. Many people believe that learning languages is the best antidote to intolerance, and some idealists still pursue the dream of universal peace through a universal language – which obviously should be English as nature and Hollywood intended, but seems more likely to be Chinese.. Unfortunately, some of the most murderous wars in history were fought between nations that shared the same language. A language is much more than vocabulary and a set of grammatical rules. It is a whole culture. Our so-called culture wars are in fact wars of words, many of them lost in translation, which is why we need to learn their language, no matter how hard it is, and they need to learn ours.

David began as a print journalist in London and taught at a British university for almost 20 years. He joined WSHU as a weekly commentator in 1992, becoming host of Sunday Matinee in 1996.