Island of lost souls

Today, I'm returning to a topic I've written about many times before — the decline of foreign language learning in the UK. So I also apologise for repeating myself. But the situation is even worse than I thought. Take the case of export sales manager Sarah Grain, for example. The company she works for in South Wales does 70% of its trade exporting to European countries. However, she was unable to fill her most recent export sales position with anyone from the UK; describing the lack of development of foreign language skills as "soul-destroying".

This is surely the consequence of a sustained decline in modern foreign language learning for at least the last decade. The statistics make for depressing reading. According to responses received from 136 secondary schools as part of a recent study by the CfBT Education Trust, the number of students in Wales taking French and German at GCSE has halved between 2002 and 2014. The decline is blamed on numerous causes, including the perceived difficulty of languages compared to other subjects, the limited choice of subjects, and timetabling or inspection pressures. To my mind, these are all excuses made by those seeking to blame the seemingly fixed education system itself. This stance conveniently absolves them of any moral responsibility to stem the decline or put pressure on others in a position to take decisive action. 

Forgive me for focussing on my favourite modern foreign language (German). However, the fate of German, in particular, is indicative of the scale of the problem. Recruiting skilled German speakers in Wales must be difficult, given that the survey found that in 2014, just 114 candidates sat German 'A' Level. Germany is the UK's biggest European export market (11%) and globally, is second only to the USA (12%). Even Switzerland features in the top 20 UK export markets (1.7%), so German, French and Italian skills would also be useful to service that trade too.

But perhaps more worrying than the educational or economic aspects are the social ones. In the conclusion to the study of language trends in Wales, the outlook is bleak:

"Teachers' responses suggest that the majority of young people in Wales are neither aware nor appreciative of the benefits which skills in foreign languages and intercultural understanding can bring in terms of advantages for study, personal development and employment. [...] To stem the dramatic decline of Modern Foreign Languages in schools across Wales and to address the widely held perception that languages are unimportant and of little use will require concerted action at the highest level, in order both to address the systemic/structural challenges being faced by schools and to begin to tackle entrenched and unhelpful social attitudes."

(Modern Foreign Languages in secondary schools in Wales

Findings from the Language Trends survey | 2014/15, CfBT Education Trust, p.57) 

England has fared slightly better than Wales in the take-up of languages at GCSE in recent years, with entries rising in 2012-2013 by 19% and 10% for French and German respectively. Though this cannot even begin to address employment needs, which require higher-level language skills. The situation is likely to only get worse in the near future, given the referendum on the UK's membership of the EU that has been promised by 2017. The political narrative on EU membership has been largely negative for decades, skewed by scaremongering over a perceived erosion of UK sovereignty and an overly simplistic, unhelpful portrayal of the movement of people between EU Member States.

Anyone in the UK currently under 58 years of age has never had a say on UK membership of the EU. That may be so, however, unless steps are taken over the coming months to highlight the economic and social benefits of EU membership — which can and should be driven by a redoubling of efforts to positively promote foreign language learning in the UK and freedom of movement to Europe, especially for younger voters — the country's future position in or out of the EU, though determined democratically, will arguably not be based on a balanced assessment of pros and cons.  

Bonjour, Monsieur Barton!

Not being a fan of football, I'd never felt compelled to write about it in relation to language – until now. This is because today we learn of Liverpool-born footballer Joey Barton, currently on a 12-month stint in Marseille, has seemingly adopted a French accent in his own speech and, by extension, the speech patterns of native French people when they speak English. C'est incroyable, ne c'est pas? Well, when you listen to the clip of him speaking, it's not incredible at all; it's perfectly understandable. And that's the point!

The practice of modifying your speech when conversing with others who do not have the same first language as you is known as speech accommodation. It would be very easy to infer that Barton is now deliberately ridiculing his French hosts through his speech. I disagree.

Let's look at the evidence: Joey Barton naturally has a very strong Liverpool accent. Though I have studied French but have never lived there, it seems logical to me that if a Scouse footballer moves to Marseille in southern France, initially at least, he'll encounter a few problems communicating and fitting in. So since his arrival in September, if he's not yet managed to let his feet do the talking, and has yet to learn French; he will have consciously and subconsciously modified his own speech to make himself understood. 

Here are just a few features I noticed during the first 30 seconds of an extract from his interview:

"Yesterday I make one tackle, all everybody speak about is this tackle [...]"

Typical of the Liverpool accent, the words make, speak and tackle are all pronounced with the /x/ phoneme (as in the Scottish word loch) rather than with the hard /k/ phoneme. Some later instances of speak are pronounced with a hard /k/, however.

"that"

Again, the initial consonant sound of that is almost a /d/, rather than a /ð/, as lampooned in the rhetorical question "They do do that though, don't they, though?", where all consonant sounds at the beginnings of all words in that sentence are pronounced in exactly the same way for comic effect (by comedian Harry Enfield and previously, in the film Yellow Submarine).

"I'm a little bit bored from the English media."

Here the /t/ phoneme in little is pronounced; whereas Barton would normally omit this sound and replace it with a glottal stop /ʔ/, which is exactly what happens in the following word bit. No French person speaking English would ever use a glottal stop in this way, so we can speculate that Barton is subconsciously copying (not ridiculing) his French colleagues before reverting to his native speech style the closer he gets to the words English media!

But just as no French person would use glottal stops in their English; a native English speaker would instinctively know about subject-predicate agreement (see "all everybody speak about" in the first sentence above). Similarly, in the second sentence, an English native speaker would use the preposition with or by but never from with the word bored. Based on these initial features, I'd say that Barton is not out to ridicule the French. He has merely assimilated their speech style through his contact with them. That being the case, the English media should – just for once – leave the guy alone.

Happy death-day tu vous?

Today I must report the imminent collapse of polite society as we know it. That's what certain French social media refuseniks would have you believe, anyway. For it seems that the enfant terrible of the Internet – Twitter – and its users, have adopted the convention of referring to others online using the informal second-person pronoun tu rather than its more formal and polite equivalent, vous.

To monolingual English readers, this issue may be about as interesting as watching fifty shades of grey paint drying; but to anyone with even minimal knowledge of foreign languages, it's a huge deal. It's so important that when, aged 21, I was living in Germany and had joined a choir, an older singer asked earnestly and in perfect English:

"Can I say you to you?"

How could I refuse? I explained that English no longer had German’s distinctions in its pronouns and she was free to address me using you. We laughed about it. But back then, everyone knew their place and the Internet had yet to sound the death knell for deference and politeness. Fast-forward to 2012 and this current debate merely signifies – online, at least – the obsolescence of the distinction.

The use of tu and vous in French or du and Sie in German is predicated on certain key criteria: the age of the people involved in the interaction; their respective statuses relative to each other and the degree of familiarity between them. The article even asserts that tu is used as a form of violence between two drivers who do not know each other. But the prevalence of familiar forms online would suggest that, notwithstanding other contextual details to the contrary, no such offence is intended. Anyone offended is simply applying mutually accepted social norms from one social sphere in another – where no such norms exist. Or do people preface their online posts with phrases such as: "I am a mature person with a high-powered job. This makes me considerably richer than you. Hence I would never meet the likes of you in real life and you shall address me accordingly."? Alternatively, unless you were interested in dating your correspondent, would you request their age/sex/location/status before agreeing to engage with them at all?

Magazine director Laurent Joffrin may bemoan the perceived lack of respect that tu signifies. But can we demand it from the outset? Respect has to be earned. Status alone cannot confer it. There is also no mention of the confusion that may arise in French given that vous is also the second-person plural pronoun. The same pronoun may, context permitting, refer to one person and many people simultaneously. We often 'broadcast' online to as many people as possible. Equally we may address one person but hope that others read what we write. We may even wish to blur any such distinctions. But how do people tell the difference? Universally using tu for one person and vous for more than one person may make this Internet-specific distinction clear.

We must concede, however, that while a move from the formal to the familiar is possible by mutual agreement; the reverse is impossible. Maybe it’s this irreversible trend that Joffrin despises. But without the smokescreen of respect and deference, his attitude merely demonstrates a refusal to accept the egalitarian ethos of the Internet itself.