Hilary Footitt
Suddenly, after September 11, we hear commentators noting with shock that only 10% of the CIA’s Middle Eastern desk could actually speak Arabic. Academics express concern that British expertise in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies is dangerously low and cannot provide us with the sort of guidance we may need to influence the future agenda. We are told that reservists who are linguists are among the first to be called up.
We are actually getting to hear foreign languages spoken more on our televisions and radios. On a Sunday morning news programme, the foreign envoy from Russia is heard to reply in Russian to David Frost’s questions. We hear the president of Pakistan speaking to his people in his first language. We listen to part of Yassar Arafat’s message broadcast in Arabic. We watch Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac addressing the media together in Paris, and distinguish some of the French the president is speaking. We see clips of subtitled interviews from the al-Jazeera TV station.
Suddenly it is clear from our television screens and radios that the world we inhabit is in practice multilingual, that people communicate with each other and often with us in languages that are not English. And, tellingly, we realise that what may be acceptable for us in English a military operation called “Infinite justice”, for example may cause grave concern to other cultures when translated into their languages.
One of the cultural shocks of September 11 is, overwhelmingly, that English is simply not enough. We cannot understand the world in English, much less search out intelligence, build ever larger coalitions of friends, and heal some of the long-standing wounds of the past. We need to be aware as never before of foreign languages and of the ways in which languages identify and represent their cultures.
“International relations” is really “intercultural relations”. It means listening to and understanding the concerns and agenda of other cultures as they express them, and not as we insist they should translate them to us in English. Indeed, perhaps one of the less heralded consequences of September 11 for the United Kingdom will be a visceral understanding that building globalisation necessarily entails participating in a multilingual world.
As from September 2002 citizenship will be taught in British schools as a national curriculum foundation subject at key stages three and four. The report of the advisory group on education for citizenship identified three interrelated strands that it thought should be intrinsic to such education: social and moral responsibility, community involvement, and political literacy.
Perhaps in the post-September 11 world we should be adding a fourth strand. Citizenship today must also comprise linguistic literacy, an informed awareness that we live in a multilingual world, and that languages express different perceptions of how we might relate to each other internationally in the future.
Languages give us access to other “countries of the mind”, and help us to look back at our own country and culture from a different and more healthily critical perspective. Monolingual citizenship will never predispose us to understand other people first in their terms and through their eyes.
The tragic events of September 11 and their aftermath have surely choked once and for all the “English is enough” mantra which has been whispered for far too long in influential circles in the UK.
What has happened over the past months has demonstrated beyond doubt that global citizenship is not English. Global citizenship is multilingual and, if we are to survive, it is the future for us all.
Hilary Footitt is chairperson of Britain’s University Council of Modern Languages (www.ucml.org.uk)