It’s difficult to find anyone who doesn’t think that the ability to speak a foreign language is a useful skill to have. Hardcore xenophobes might not acknowledge the advantages of being able to speak Hindi, Spanish or Xhosa in addition to English, but everyone else recognises the advantages of speaking one or more languages in addition to our native tongue.
This truism is so entrenched in the collective mind that the topic is rarely brought up for debate; the value of learning foreign languages is a piety of our cosmopolitan, multicultural society that is rarely questioned. The advantages are obvious: being bi-, tri- or multilingual enables us to communicate easily with people in far-off lands, without the need to fumble on our phones with Google Translate and all its shortcomings. And the learning of another language, so gerontologists tell us, can also help to ward off dementia and general cognitive decline.
But in Australia, actually following through on that belief in the value of learning a foreign language is a different matter altogether. Over 300 languages are spoken in homes in this country1, but in most cases those languages are part of the speaker’s cultural patrimony, or what linguists call a heritage language2; not nearly so many of us learn a language that our family has no history of speaking. The existence of so many languages in Australian homes is just a consequence of the huge range of countries from which Australia draws its immigrants, which shouldn’t be confused with a multilingual nation that is a result of a wholehearted commitment to making it easier to for masses of school students to study a foreign language. The profusion of languages spoken here might mistakenly lead you to think that Australia is a country that enthusiastically encourages the learning of languages – which it isn’t.
I’ve often heard monoglot English speakers in Australia berate and judge themselves as lazy for speaking only one language. But the self-flagellation is unwarranted; it’s obvious that there are factors at play that are far more powerful than any person’s individual will that make it less likely for an anglophone Australian to start learning another language, let alone master it. Similarly, there are equally powerful geographical and demographic factors that shape the linguistic behaviour of, for example, Western Europeans and Indians, making it more likely that they will learn a second or third language when compared with us.
The first factor making that makes it more difficult for a native anglophone Aussie to learn another language is our geographic isolation. Unlike Germany, for example, which is bordered by nine countries, not a single country abuts Australia. According to WorldAtlas.com3, 67% of Germans speak a language other than German. In Australia, a person of native anglophone heritage who speaks another language is an oddity. But in Germany, finding a person with a purely German ancestry who speaks only German would be a rarity. Most Germans learn English as their first foreign language at school.
And in the case of India, it doesn’t even need to be surrounded by people who speak other languages or import them to make it a multilingual country; there are so many different language groups already within that country. According to the Indian Constitution, 22 languages are officially recognised, but the 2001 census recorded that India has 122 major languages and 1599 other languages4. Friends of mine from Mumbai, in addition to their native tongue of Marathi, also speak Hindi and English. In India, trilingual people like them are not the linguistic oddity they would be if they were native anglophones in Australia.
For Germans, being able to speak English and French – and maybe Dutch, Italian or Spanish if they are especially enthusiastic – undoubtedly confers many benefits for everyday interactions, not to mention career opportunities. That’s because the countries in which these languages are natively spoken are so close to Germany. And if you’re an Indian, being able to speak Malayalam, Tamil, Bengali or Hindi makes travelling around your own country and interacting with your compatriots much easier.
Indians and Germans are like sops marinating in linguistic crucibles in which it’s almost impossible not to learn another language. But in Australia – girt by the linguistically repellent sea – we have no neighbours to exert pressure on us to learn another language. The nearest country to Sydney and Melbourne is New Zealand, another English-speaking nation, so there’s no pressure from our immediate east to learn another language. Contrast our situation with that of the United States, which has Mexico right on its south-west border. This proximity of Mexico means that about 12% of the US population aged five or older speak Spanish at home. The presence of numerous other Spanish-speaking countries south of Mexico and the consequent influx of migrants to the US ensure that Spanish exerts a huge linguistic influence on the United States.
The proximity of foreign-language speakers to the average Indian, German or American makes it much more likely that a citizen of these countries will learn a foreign language than the average anglophone Aussie. Indulging in self-shaming and decrying one’s inability to speak more than one language is a pointless exercise, because it fails to recognise these wider factors – which are far more potent than the puny will of an individual human in determining which languages they speak – that militate against an anglophone Aussie learning another language.
But in addition to our geographically imposed insularity, there is another odd factor that prevents Australians from learning another language: our psychological block about learning foreign languages. If you speak only English, you probably aren’t even aware that you almost certainly have this deeply entrenched belief that it’s extraordinarily difficult to learn another language. If a rare anglophone does manage to master another language – or several languages – they are often described as having “a flair for languages”. But no-one ever talks of a school student having “a flair for geography” or “a flair for economics”, so it is odd to think that proficiency in foreign languages could be ascribed to some sort of genetic endowment that is not available to students of geography or economics. The use of the word “flair” seems harmless, but it implies that successfully mastering another language depends on having this mysterious aptitude rather than the most likely prerequisite: being situated in a country where multilingualism is the norm – either because many other languages are already spoken in that country, or because countries that speak other languages are on your doorstep or not far away. Foreign languages in such places are not the mysterious, exotic and often frightening phenomena that they are to many monoglot Aussies, and it’s this normalisation of foreign languages in places like Germany and India that makes it easier to put in the hours to learn them; citizens of those countries see and hear lots of other people who have successfully done what they are in the process of doing – mastering a foreign language. No-one in Germany or India – especially young people – thinks there is anything special about any of their compatriots who can speak two or more languages. And although I haven’t done the research, I’m sure that there would be no evidence that the brains of monoglot English-speaking Aussies, when compared to the brains of their Indian or German counterparts, are conspicuously ill-equipped to learn languages.
A few months back I suffered from a bout of insomnia, so I started listening to ABC Overnights, a radio program broadcast between 2.00am and 5.00am. A quiz takes place in the first hour of the show, but as broadcaster Rod Quinn has observed, the quiz isn’t really about testing general knowledge; he admits that it’s really just a pretext to get people to call in and engage in conversation.
One night a woman called in and mentioned that she had been learning Finnish. That captured my drifting attention, because several years back I also attended Finnish language classes. Finnish is spoken by scarcely more than 5.5 million people, so whenever I hear that someone speaks this minority language I listen up.
A month or so later I was awake at about 2.30am, so I called Rod to play the quiz. I mentioned to him that, like his caller from a month before, I had also learned some Finnish. But I detected a tone of disappointment in Rod’s voice when I said that I was no longer learning it.
I had many good reasons, though, not to continue to learn Finnish. (Which reminds me that I’ll soon post an entry on this blog about why you shouldn’t learn another language.) I started to learn it about a year before I went to Finland for the first time, to visit relatives on my mother’s side of my family. I had acquired only the rudiments of the language, but knowing even that small amount made a big impression on my relatives, so I’m not at all sorry that I spent 40 hours or so to learn the basics.
But after I returned to Australia I knew that I wouldn’t be going back to Finland for some time; I thought it would be pointless to put in the hours and effort to master the byzantine complexity of the declension of Finnish nouns – which feature not only the nominative and accusative cases, but also the essive, inessive, elative, illative, ablative and more. It’s a beautiful language – at least to my ear – but trying to learn it while I’m not surrounded by Finnish speakers and when it would have no immediate benefit for me seemed like an obvious waste of time and energy, especially when there were so many other skills to learn that were clamouring for my limited time and attention.
My decision to stop learning Finnish, I said to Rod, had nothing to do with the difficulty of learning the language but more to do with its having no practical purpose in my life right now. It’s not as if any suburbs of Sydney are filled with loads of expat Finns on whom I can practise my emerging language skills. And even if Finns were to come here en masse, they all speak English so much better than I can speak their language, so learning Finnish would be of no practical value at all.
I didn’t want to get into a boring discussion about why I should have continued to learn Finnish, so I switched to the topic of the peculiar Australian psychological block regarding the learning of languages.
“Australians,” I said, “just seem to have this immovable idea in their heads that it’s incredibly difficult to learn a foreign language.”
Millions of Europeans, I pointed out, have mastered either the rudiments or an intermediate level of English, enabling them to get by in their work as a waiter in Venice or as a tour guide in Dubrovnik. It’s a sure bet, I added, that most of these people don’t possess any extraordinary intellectual or linguistic gifts that made it easier for them to learn English. The perfect exemplar of this block is Barry Jones, the 1960s Australian quiz champion, former Labor politician and all-round brainiac. He once said on a radio show that learning French had defeated him. He had tried, but failed, to master even one foreign language5. Why can a humble restaurant worker in Croatia converse easily with English-speaking tourists, but this prodigious polymath is left, literally, speechless when trying to master French or German? The answer: Barry just had the misfortune, from a linguistic viewpoint, of being born in Australia, where multilingualism among native anglophones is the very rare exception rather than the rule. Because we so rarely see large numbers of anglophones learning foreign languages, we lack enough role models to show us that it’s possible – and that it’s not that difficult.
I’m sure Barry Jones doesn’t have any intellectual deficits that would have contributed to his inability to learn a foreign language. If you had transplanted him at an early age to Italy or Croatia, it’s difficult to believe that all his equally intelligent confrѐres would have mastered English while he would have been left lagging.
I became firmly convinced that the chronic Australian “inability” to learn languages was nothing more than a state of mind after I encountered a young woman from Hong Kong when I worked in the disability employment sector. She was a native speaker of Cantonese and had a mild intellectual disability. Despite that limitation, she could nonetheless speak English reasonably well and she could even make jokes in English. Why can a young native Cantonese speaker with an intellectual disability easily conduct a conversation in English, while monoglot Aussies are burdened with the false belief in the impossibility of mastering another language? The answer is easy: people in Hong Kong have had plenty of opportunities to rub up against the English language over the past century, and as a result they are not afraid of it.
I’m starting to think that these psychological blocks are exerting their pernicious effect not only on languages; mathematics has surely long been a victim of the same phenomenon. Just about every Australian has now heard of Eddie Woo, the Sydney maths teacher who is trying to subvert the deeply held belief among many of us that maths is a difficult subject for which only a gifted few have an aptitude. He says repeatedly that he was never particularly good at maths at school, and he’s trying to communicate the message that it is possible to go from zero to hero when it comes to wrestling with calculus and algebra. Eddie is a bundle of enthusiasm and a great guy, and he’s no doubt helping a lot of his students, both face-to-face and via WooTube. But I suspect that, despite all his fervent proselytising, he’s going to find it difficult to smash the crippling belief in the wider community that maths is a difficult subject that only brainiacs can master. Many of his former students know that it’s a myth, but they have actually experienced what it’s like to have an entrenched and limiting belief smashed. They are lucky enough to have had high-quality, innovative teaching that, whether Eddie acknowledges it or not, deconstructs psychological barriers as much as it instructs students in probability and exponential equations. If, on the other hand, you have only heard someone tell you that maths doesn’t have to be impossibly difficult, your deep-seated maths phobia isn’t likely to budge.
If large numbers of young Australians of the near future are to have any hope of successfully learning languages – or maths or anything else that at first seems challenging – then we will need to acknowledge the existence of these hidden, unexamined and insidious collective beliefs that are the real encumbrances holding us back from reaching our full potential. So-called hard-headed pragmatists can blather on all they like about how only things that can be seen and touched matter, but beliefs – those wispy, intangible things that can’t be grasped or weighed and that are the product of our life experiences – have a hugely unacknowledged capacity to shape the courses of our lives, whether for good or for ill. TG