The United Nations has proclaimed this year the Year of Languages
The General Assembly this afternoon, recognizing that genuine multilingualism promotes unity in diversity and international understanding, proclaimed 2008 the International Year of Languages.
Now, do you think that the Education ministries of the UK will pay heed to this and ensure that the necessary support is given to schools to enable each and every child to benfit from an entitlement to learn a foreign language (to whatever level they feel fit.)
More and more employers and universities a seeing the value of having people who have learned a language. It is not good enough to be lazy about language learning in this country any more. We are the laughing stock of Europe when it comes to linguistic ability and various governments have not helped by taking MFL out of the core curriculum.
According to the CIA World Fact Book just over 10% of the worlds population speak English as either a primary or secondary language...what about the rest. British businesses lose out to businesses because of an inability to communicate.
As this article says:
The rest of the world is becoming more multilingual - and monolingual English speakers are being left behind. Those that have learnt English as a foreign language have every right to compete for jobs in the English speaking market, and if they are more qualified than those that speak English as a primary language, this could leave a huge chunk of the UK population without jobs.
(I suppose this would give even more fuel to the Daily Mail / Express' rants about immigrants taking away our jobs; but if you don't have the tool;s you can't do the job.)
Time for us to wake up.
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You make some good points here. "Core Anglophone" countries have apparent benefits, but hiidden disadvantages from English becoming the global lingua franca. Language education strategies can also pay attention to bilingual instruction of children of immigrants.
BTW, I posted a link to this entry on a list of blogs that mention the International Year of Languages at http://donosborn.org/iyl/index.php/Main/BloggingIYL .
Posted by: Don | Monday, 28 January 2008 at 02:59