Author: British Academy
Date of Publication: 2019
Key messages on language skills:
A coordinated, strategy for languages in the UK could help to:
- Create a global Britain that forges stronger trade and business links.
- Create the mindset of cultural agility which enhances employability.
- Strengthen the UK’s capacity for research and innovation—in science, technology, engineering, culture, the arts, humanities, social sciences, and many industries
- Raise attainment standards across the school curriculum. Research has shown that languages are key facilitating subjects: they help with literacy and improve children’s access to other subjects within school.
- Enhance skills and productivity in many sectors which face a language skills crisis, including the tourism and hospitality sector.
- Further strengthen our diplomacy and soft power, our defence and security, and our work in international development.
- Improve social mobility by giving all children the language skills that foster literacy, educational attainment, and a confident mindset.
- Build social cohesion. Valuing ‘community’ languages aids social integration and national linguistic capacity, strengthening security and diplomacy.
- Improve the quality and accessibility of public service interpreting and translation
- Enhance our well-being: acquiring even basic competence in an additional language opens up our understanding of other cultures, our opportunities, our travel, our contacts, and our capacity to engage with those who are different from us.
- Improve health and reduce health expenditure: research is beginning to suggest that the onset of dementia occurs earlier in monolinguals than in bilinguals, and that monolinguals recover more slowly from strokes.
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