“Spanish is clearly now the world’s coolest language. So why do we push children to learn French?”, asks Gary Nunn in the Guardian.
His argument for pushing children to learn Spanish rather than French is something about Bad Bunny, whoever that is, singing at the Superbowl, whatever that is, plus a slightly less childish argument about how more people worldwide speak Spanish than French. So they do, but that does not rescue the entire article from having the air of being written by una rata en un saco. Mr Nunn may well get his wish that Spanish should dislodge French as the main language taught in British schools, but the triumph will be spoilt by whispers that there is increasingly little practical point in teaching any foreign language to children who already speak English, the language the whole world wants to learn. Mr Nunn says that his Spanish has allowed him to “remote-work my way across Latin America and learn to salsa with guapo men in nightclubs” which is nice for him, but the number of current pupils likely to dance in his footsteps is low.
Fate played a cruel trick on British teachers of modern languages. When I was a girl, they had just fought a successful campaign to dethrone Latin and Greek. In vain did the teachers of dead languages bleat about widening cultural perspectives and indefinable cognitive benefits. Teachers of French and German and Spanish talked better, stronger, more manly talk about how many tens of millions of living humans spoke their favoured languages; about exports and global relevance and earning potential. They quoted Willy Brandt, “You may buy from me in your own language, but sell to me in mine”, and they won.
But now the German for “job” is “der job” and the Spanish for “marketing” is “el marketing” and it turns out that Germans and Spaniards will not just buy in English but conduct their international business in it. And the teachers and enthusiasts for modern languages are reduced to fighting over which of them will grab the largest share of the shrinking number of English-speaking pupils willing to put the effort in to learn any of them, while dredging up from memory all that benthic detritus about “seeing the world in with different eyes” that they mocked so mercilessly when it came out of the mouths of the classicists half a century ago.
As I have been saying for more than a decade, my feelings about the triumph of English are not particularly triumphant. Not only do I mourn the beigeificiation of the world, I fear that when we are down to just Mandarin, English and Spanish the state will find it even easier to control us than it does now. There have been many times in history when minority languages served as a literal speakeasy for minority opinions and where dead languages helped keep free thought alive.
Man’s an idiot.
Bad Bunny was singing at the Superbowl in a country bordering a nation which itself is bordering Central America then almost an entire continent mostly speaking Spanish.
The Guardian is published in the UK. A country which… isn’t any of those things.
I think learning a language as an English speaker, serves two purposes: firstly it helps you learn about language itself, which is to say you understand your native language better, plus it has utility to enable you to travel and enjoy it more, or speak to other native speakers for the pleasure and to some extent the respect of doing it.
One could argue that kids don’t need to study English in schools. After all they can already speak and write it. But we do so for deeper enrichment and I think foreign language serves the same purpose.
So I think foreign language education is a good thing. And if you are going to teach one Spanish has the benefit over French in that it is spoken in many interesting countries (sure, French is spoken in the Ivory Coast, but who wants to go there?) Plus it is considered one of the easiest languages to learn, which means you get more bang for less bucks.
Finally, if you speak Spanish you can mostly struggle by in Portuguese and Italian. And seriously, who doesn’t want to experience Carnival in Rio at least once in their lives.