Why is 'modern language' taken to mean 'European language'?

Modern languages are not merely European languages. Obvious as this may seem, it needs restating as I discovered when attending a Westminster Education Forum devoted to “The future of Modern Foreign Languages in Higher Education” in London earlier this year.

The Westminster Education Forum targets policy makers, educational practitioners and academics to share thoughts on issues related to education in the UK. Attended by colleagues teaching “Modern Foreign Languages” in the UK, the focus of the event was staunchly on French, Italian, Spanish – in short, on European languages. As a university educator of Korean, I found this Eurocentrism somewhat surprising and alienating.

While it is true that the provision of Asian language teaching in the UK is poor compared to European languages, we urgently need to have a discussion as to whether this should not change.

To begin with, the linguistic landscape in the UK has radically changed. According to the 2011 Census, after Polish the next five main spoken languages other than English are Asian: Panjabi, Urdu, Bengali, Gujarati and Arabic. This means that the majority of languages other than English spoken in the UK are no longer European languages but Asian languages. This is in line with migration demographics: The 2011 Census also showed that about a third of the foreign-born population identified as Asian/Asian British (33%, 2.4 million). Until now, however, this linguistic and demographic change has not been significantly reflected in national language teaching.

Furthermore, Asian languages figure prominently among the most important languages for the UK in terms of trade, diplomacy, and security. According to a 2013 British Council Report, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Turkish and Japanese are the ten most important “languages for the future” in the UK. Korean is ranked 14th in this report.

Unfortunately, language teaching policies are lagging behind. The UK government is only now starting to recognise the importance of Asian languages. For instance, the Mandarin Excellence Programme was launched in 2016 with the aim to deliver a minimum of 5,000 fluent speakers of Mandarin by 2020. This is a very positive move and awareness of the importance of Asian languages now needs to spread to other languages, too.

In my work as Associate Professor of Korean Linguistics at Oxford University, I work towards this goal together with the Korean Embassy. In collaboration with exam boards we work to include Korean as one additional option among the modern foreign languages in the GCSE. However, we sense a reluctance from some exam boards and publishers that is difficult to understand.

The Westminster Forum event was another occasion where a lot of effort was put into the – undoubtedly important – promotion of European language learning. However, why should this have to mean that non-European languages have to be given the cold shoulder? As we reconceptualze the UK’s multilingualism as a national asset, surely all languages have a role to play?

Originally published by Language On The Move under a CC-BY licence