As I approach sixty and as a UK resident I am ashamed to admit that the only language I can speak is English. There are positives to this and plenty of negatives. Please allow me to explain further.

A quick query in Google reveals that English is the most spoken language in the world. It has 1.5 billion speakers with Mandarin Chinese in second at 1.1 billion speakers and Hindi in third with 610 million speakers. The English total is of course massively boosted by the number of people who learn it as a second language.

Consequently I feel that having English as my native tongue has been massively beneficial from a career point of view and when travelling. It’s seen as the language of business, so when you are meeting colleagues from Europe or, for example, India the onus is always on them (unfairly) to have learnt English as that’s the language meetings are usually conducted in. Similarly when you are on holiday, menus or information at train stations often seems to contain English versions.

So far so good but this does make you lazy with languages and in some cases almost ignorant. Feeling that you can be understood in any country just be using English and then shouting English louder if you’re not understood the first time.

There are reasons for this. Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s when I was still at school there were opportunities to learn both German and French. Back then though as the country wrestled with what ultimately deindustrialisation would mean they were seen as ‘nice to haves’ and more for the academically able. Skills such as woodworking and metalworking were rightly still highly valued set against studying languages which the vast majority were not going to be able to put to practical use.

From there the dye is pretty much cast. Or at least you think it is until the twenty first century comes along and the world becomes ever more interconnected. The company you have worked at for many years is taken over by a German company. It’s then that you discover to your horror that many of your German colleagues can actually speak better English than you and your compatriots. Embarrassingly all the meetings take place in English while you struggle with the basics of even introducing yourself in German.

To conclude I think it’s fair to say that being a native English speaker gives you almost a ‘free pass’ in many areas of daily life. On the other hand it most definitely doesn’t help with self development. With so many other fellow speakers the motivation to learn a second language just isn’t there for most. Not good.