Postcards from the Edge
We don’t need to speak a second language, because everybody else does – and it’s English, says Mary Kenny
It’s a source of lamentation that the learning of European languages is in continuous decline in the United Kingdom: while 98 per cent of Luxembourgers and 94 per cent of the Dutch speak a second language proficiently, only 39 per cent of the British do – and many Brits who are bilinguists may have a parent who is a native speaker of another tongue.
According to the annual Language Trends report, the drop-off of language learning after GCSE is alarming: 94 per cent of school students quit learning French and German as soon as they can, and 91 per cent stop studying Spanish. This is a pattern that well predates Brexit – the graph started to decline in 2000. The fact is that most Brits can’t be fagged persisting with another language.
Why? Because they don’t need to. Proficiency in a second language is linked to the need to communicate, to express yourself or to trade. Who, aside from the Dutch themselves, speaks Dutch? (OK, Nick Clegg, because his Ma is Dutch.) Who speaks the strange German-french dialect of Lëtzebuergesch outside Luxembourg? No one. Swedish and Danish are seldom mastered by those beyond Scandinavia.
The nations good at a second language are those that need to be. The societies least proficient in foreign language skills are those with a global reach in their own tongue – English and Spanish.
English is so widespread now that it has been dubbed ‘Globish’. It is by far the most popular second language for most Continental Europeans. My audiologist in Deal, who comes from Portugal, says, ‘All our technical material is written in English – so we need to know it.’
The EU has 24 official lingos, but only three working languages – French, German and English. And it’s been predicted that English will be even more widely used within the EU after Brexit. The Swedish academic Dr Marko Modiano claims that a new mode of English is developing: ‘Euro-english’.
Since the British will no longer be present in the corridors of Brussels, Euro-english will be ‘owned’ by the Europeans, not by the Queen. It will assume the status that Latin had in the Europe of the Holy Roman Empire – a neutral lingua franca.
Meanwhile, in London, we are told that a whole new form of English is appearing. MLE is Multicultural London English – as words from Arabic, Somali and Jamaican enter the common discourse. That’s very peng, habib.*
There’s a saintly woman in Ireland called Alice Leahy who has dedicated 40 years of her life to caring for the homeless and the rough sleepers, whose number are increasing in the Irish capital, as elsewhere. One of the most practical services she performs is cleaning their feet. Modern ‘sneakers’, which everyone now wears, make the feet more sweaty and cruddy than leather shoes and the street people – who may also have mental health problems – need this kindly chiropody attention.
Alice has written a memoir about her work with the homeless, The Stars Are Our Only Warmth, in which she recounts helping a young prostitute who had been beaten up. She met the lass afterwards in O’connell Street and asked her if she was using contraception. ‘Don’t worry, Alice,’ came the reply. ‘I’m on the Pill and I take them all at once so I don’t forget!’
The Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury, with support from the Arts Council, is offering a free creative writing course to help local people understand the impact of the IRA bombing of Deal in 1989 (when 11 young bandsmen were killed and 21 wounded). It was a horrific attack on innocent teenagers, and it’s right that the 30th anniversary should be marked by history, poetry, story and play-writing. But it would also be right to see it marked by justice: no one has ever been charged with the atrocity. The prime suspect lives in Dublin, apparently at ease financially.
Julie Burchill had the bright idea of writing a play (with her friend Jane Robins) about Brexit’s impact on warring friends, People Like Us – produced at the cosy Union Theatre, in south London, in October. Although lively and sassy, it was too much of a polemic to be a convincing drama: a play has to engage through the characters’ emotions, rather than as a rant.
Yet my theatre companion said that it amplified some of the confrontations she witnessed outside her grandchildren’s school in Kensington. Some of the French parents were openly furious about Brexit, and prompted ‘scenes’ with British parents – still unresolved.
I also have a close friend who has been rudely yelled at by London pals because her boyfriend is a Brexiteer. Burchill is on to a meaningful theme, which still has dramatic potential.
* A good thing, friend