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Talking up Culture

by Neil Thomas
May 17th, 2010

Here is a paradox: on the one hand, there is the increasing acknowledgement that English is becoming the lingua franca (!) of international communications (written and verbal), yet, on the other hand, we berate ourselves for our poor foreign language skills and for the worsening and declining language education being provided in our schools.

English and its derivatives/variations (variously, Spanglish, Panglish, Englasian, Konglish, Manglish – you are reading this blog most likely in English, so you will be able to work out what these mean!) are now forming the premier league, as it were, of language, particularly of business exchanges. Add to this the identification of Globish by the Frenchman Jean-Paul Nerriere as a kind of ‘decaffeinated English” or “the worldwide dialect of the third millennium” and you can see where all this is headed as far as linguistic development is concerned.

Perhaps, we should not, therefore, beat ourselves up (as the press are wont to do) about our lack of language skills and training – for example, in The Times on 15th March, an article was headed “Schools are teaching pupils to be the linguistic paupers of Europe” with a section starting off with “So, parlez vous…anything at all”

We have said this before, but really cultural understanding is more important than linguistic understanding. Indeed, cultural understanding is the real passport to successful communication. This is where there is no excuse for not knowing as much as you can about the culture of different countries, from both the business and personal development aspects. This is what the debate will be about in the future, I suspect, rather than trying to measure how many schoolchildren are sitting GCSE French, German, Spanish, or Italian.

Comments (2)

Certainly agree with the assertion that cultural understanding can be as important as language learning. In my experience, the fascination with a foreign country begins with the culture – the food, the architecture and so on – and at some point, if the attraction is strong enough, the urge to learn the language follows.

Posted by Sebastian • 17 May 2010, 09:40

Let’s state with confidence that the English are and always have been good linguists. Our diplomatic service once boasted formidable linguists, and there can be no major work of literature in any language that has not been elegantly translated into English by highly gifted home-grown linguists. 19th century explorers and missionaries all mastered native languages, many of them, contrary to popular belief, prodigiously difficult phonetically and syntactically, if spoken by so-called primitive peoples. So, there is no inherent impediment from which a native-language English speaker suffers that prevents him from learning any language.

Posted by john harcourt • 5 July 2010, 18:10