As British Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves searches for ways to stimulate growth, here is a reminder to her — on the International Day of Multilingualism — that she is sitting on a huge pot of gold. In 2014, the all-party parliamentary group on modern languages estimated that the UK’s untapped linguistic potential was worth ￡48 billion (US$62.1 billion). It is ￡8 billion more than Reeves added to the tax bill last year, and if anything it has grown, since Brexit has reoriented “global Britain” toward customers beyond Europe. Ask any native English speaker who trades internationally: If you are buying, English would do, but if you are selling, better to speak the client’s tongue.
The UK’s language teaching has been in steady decline for 30 years, and a big cause is a lack of qualified language teachers. That is one reality. Another is that, over the same period, the country has become more linguistically diverse. It has an expanding pool of fluent bilinguals, sometimes multilinguals, who are being ignored — their other languages in some cases stigmatized. Often, those languages are native to regions our post-Brexit businesses would dearly love to sell to.
Not only is the government not tapping that pool of speakers, it is pretending the pool does not exist. In 2021, the census for England and Wales asked one question about language: “What is your main language?” (And for those who did not answer “English” to that question: “How well can you speak English?”). For a person who speaks more than one language, University of Edinburgh neuroscientist Thomas Bak said that is like asking the parent of several children: “Which is your main child?” People were prevented from explaining that they spoke one language at home and another at work. (The question was slightly different in Scotland, but barely more informative.)
Illustration: Louise Ting
The census is conducted every 10 years, and Bak is one of a group of researchers who have been campaigning to alter the question in the next edition. They are asking for a tweak of a few letters, so that it reads: “What are your main languages?” and for the response box to be enlarged. So far, even that modest request has been ignored. It is a moot point as to whether the census would exist in 2031, so you could argue that the campaign is purely symbolic. However, for now the census is the only way of gauging the nation’s linguistic capital, and it forms the basis for the government’s language policy for the next decade.
How, then, do we know that the UK is becoming more multilingual? By extrapolating from a hotchpotch of academic studies, school surveys and the census itself. In England and Wales in 2021, more than 90 different answers were given to the language question, which is probably a vast underestimate, because of the way the question was asked. More than 300 languages are spoken in London, while in England the proportion of schoolchildren whose first language is not English has been increasing year-on-year. It stands at about one in five. The US and many continental European countries are on a similar trajectory.
It is instructive to set that situation in its historical context. Monolingualism was an invention of the nation state, only a few centuries ago, but the word has always described an aspiration more than a reality, despite temporarily effective and often cruel attempts to suppress non-official languages and dialects. For tens or even hundreds of thousands of years before the modern period, Homo sapiens was multilingual, and much of the world remained so even after Europe and its former colonies insisted on a linguistic standard.
Seen in that light, the present trend looks like a reversion to type. Immigration is part of the explanation: Over the 400 years of the colonial period, the net flow of people was away from Europe; since World War II, it has been towards Europe. However, there are other forces at work. Although immigrants continue to bow to pressure to assimilate, French linguist Francois Grosjean has found that they are holding on to their native languages for longer — over generations. Already in 1982, he could make the discombobulating claim that “there is probably a larger proportion of bilinguals in monolingual nations than in bilingual and multilingual countries.”
Still, many people in officially monolingual countries cling to the false notion that monolingualism is the natural state of humanity. It is particularly cherished by isolationist states, even though, absurdly enough, they probably need better indigenous language skills than networked ones. The administration of US President Donald Trump has declared English the official language of the US, while under the UK’s Turing scheme for student exchange, British students can go abroad, but foreign students cannot return. Many academics consider Turing a poor relation of the EU’s Erasmus program, which it replaced after Brexit.
The potential benefits of multilingualism are not only economic. Many studies have shown that speaking more than one language protects against dementia, which cost the UK ￡42 billion last year. Imagine if we not only reduced that bill by teaching languages better, but covered it entirely with the income generated by bringing our native linguists into the workforce?
Acquiring languages is good for mental health, too, because it expands the pool of potential connections. There is even evidence that multilinguals are more rational and open-minded than monolinguals, and that they can access more memories.
So here is a checklist for the chancellor and her cabinet colleagues: Make our languages visible; create incentives for multilinguals to become language teachers and translators; think about ways of assessing children’s language skills more flexibly than through a General Certificate of Secondary Education and the English baccalaureate, and not just in German and Spanish, but in Mandarin, Bengali and Swahili, too. More generally, value linguistic diversity and forget “one nation, one language.” That dictum has had its day and it was short.
Laura Spinney is a science journalist and the author of Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global and Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World
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