Jessy Fairweather’s first tutorial in Buenos Aires did not go to plan. The Spanish student blurted out the verb “coger” – meaning to catch (the bus), but also a colloquial expletive, which had all heads turned. It’s the blunder every student heading abroad dreads, and for University of Edinburgh students weighing up a year abroad, whether or not you speak the local language tends to rank far above “how far will I be from George Square?”
Language is both the inspiration for going somewhere new and the exact thing that stops us, especially if you’re British. Myriads of studies show the neurological benefits of learning languages, so what is amiss?
Brits come with a reputation. Last year, The Spectator’s Anthony Browne described the “media funk” condemning Britons as too lazy to learn languages. He noted that English speakers have an international loophole (Canada, America, Australia) which doesn’t require a “phrasebook.” The problem becomes one of opportunity: “If you are British, learning another language means having few opportunities to practice it, unless you seek them out.”
So, are British students lazy, or just lacking practice? Returning students indicate that “fear,” not “laziness”, is what held them back. Applied linguist Aneta Pavlenko suggests this fear is often rooted in a “monolingual bias” — the exhausting, internal pressure to sound like a native speaker.
Fear also grows with ‘typological distance’ (how structurally different a language is from your own). Those in Australia, frank green in hand, en route to Pilates, seemed less fearful than those navigating the streets of Argentina with broken, GCSE, idiom-infested Spanish. Unsurprisingly, Australia’s localised but highly intelligible slang like “arvo,” the diaspora network, and shared cultural consumption of shows like Peep Show and Neighbours means you’ll have an easy run of it.
However, heading abroad is not always an option. There are countless apps for monoglot Brits: Duolingo, Tandem, and Babbel to name a few. Yet, with French and Spanish dominating app downloads and school curriculums, only six per cent of Duolingo users ever reach fluency in either. There is also a disconnect between the languages learnt online and those spoken in England and Wales: the 2021 census lists Polish (1.1 per cent), Romanian (0.8 per cent), Punjabi, and Urdu (0.5 per cent each) as the most common main languages after English. Overall, beyond community and heritage languages, the gap with our neighbours remains stark: in 2016 64.5% of 25 to 64-year-olds in the European Union spoke a foreign language, almost double the United Kingdom’s 34.6 per cent.
Policy hasn’t helped. English joined French as the language of international diplomacy at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, as a “global lingua franca.” In 1951, it became the de facto “language of the skies.” In 2004, when the government made languages optional at GCSE, uptake fell sharply from 80 to 40 per cent. The cost shows: a British Council survey found that more than a quarter of UK adults (26 per cent) regret never learning a foreign language.
For psychology student Edith Broch, the cost of this label matters: “Being linguistically lazy, post Brexit, doesn’t benefit students socially or economically.” So, what are students doing?
Architecture student Billy Baring spent six months working in Mexico City. Taking Browne’s point about seeking out practice literally, he arrived knowing “next-to-nothing” of Spanish. “It took me three weeks to be interested- within three months I had fallen in love with the language, and the people — out of respect.” His one warning, albeit not a faux pas: be cautious of “la venganza de Moctezuma”— a humorous term for traveller’s diarrhoea.
However, you don’t need full fluency to assimilate into a culture either. Politics student Zac Clarke spent his year in Montreal with little French, which cost him a café job but not his cultural experience.
“Seeing ‘arrêt’ rather than stop on the street was a poignant reminder that Quebec isn’t Canada, and Canada is by no means America.” Obvious? Perhaps, but even slow-drip language exposure can open cultural dimensions and aesthetics you wouldn’t otherwise access.
Fear is personal and mediated by biases we hold about fitting in. Nancy Collin, who interned for six months in Paris, felt an identity-shift first-hand: “My French-self has no humour, it’s just a worse off personality.” This self-deprecating tone reflected her initial isolation and frustration at work. However, after successfully navigating a nine-to-five job in French by developing a degree of professional fluency, “I got over the stereotype that if you aren’t French, you shouldn’t even bother, it is really the opposite!” Her remedy? Exposure.
For Jessy, exposure came with a few more bruises, such as learning that “regla” means both rule and menstrual period in different Spanish dialects. To surmount the fear of learning a language as a Brit, you must take agency and lean into the chaos. As Jessy discovered: “faux-pas fever… weirdly makes you more confident.”
Photo by Bruno Guerrero on Unsplash.
