The Hindu Business Line : More languages, the merrier

Champions of local languages must move beyond emotional arguments and work to ensure that the languages they champion are required for more than their aesthetics.

C. Gopinath C. Gopinath

The Malaysian government has decided to switch from English to the national language, Bahasa Malaysia, as the medium of instruction to teach math and physics to school students. This has brought to the fore all the usual debates and concerns about language.

There are those who worry that such subjects can only be taught in English and the switch to the local language may mean ineffective learning. Others worry that the reduced stress on English would make students less competitive in their job search.

The government worries that teaching in English reduces the competitiveness of the rural students who are more comfortable in their native language. These debates in Malaysia are familiar across the developing world, especially in post-colonial societies.

English and FDI

As the use of English in global commerce grows, governments have been joining the push to popularise it. Indians claim their knowledge of English as an important reason for the growth of their software industry worldwide.

China and South Korea are two countries that are paying a lot of attention to the teaching of English in their educational institutions with an eye toward better global integration.

A paper presented at the Academy of International Business meeting in San Diego last month provides empirical support on the role of English.

The paper looked at the inward foreign direct investment in 56 countries and found that knowledge of English in the destination country was a significant variable explaining the investment. Other studies have found that individuals in most countries prefer to study the language of the countries with the highest shares of total trade.

There is no denying the power and spread of English. About 35 per cent of the world’s population resides in 61 English-speaking countries. There is an English-speaking country in close proximity to almost any nation in the world, making the learning of that language valuable. By 2050, half the world’s population is expected to be proficient in it. But surely, there is room for other languages too!

Fortunately, we learn a language and communicate for more reasons than trade and investment! More often, it is for a more mundane reason such as seeking a job.

It is not surprising that in Macaulay’s India, people were prepared to pay a fee for their children to learn English in a private school (for that was surely the way to a job in the colonial administration), rather than study Sanskrit or Arabic free, which led to limited career opportunities.

But nationalist leaders worry that the situation has not changed. Champions of local languages must step beyond their emotional arguments and work to ensure that the languages they champion are required for more than the aesthetics of the language.

In favour of multi-lingualism

A language is also a window to another’s culture. Moreover, even attempting to speak another’s language immediately creates a bond. Scientists have found other benefits to learning languages.

One study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences studied how learning a second language affects the way a child thinks. The study found that children growing up in bilingual households were more adept in the brain’s executive function. That is, their ability to plan, organise, prioritise activities, and shift their attention from one to another is superior.

Knowing and being able to communicate in one’s mother tongue is taken as a birthright, and most people are willing to learn another language to further their access to opportunities. Scandinavian countries were among the earliest to realise that multi-lingualism is the way of the future.

With small local populations, they introduced English, and other European languages as required, very early in the school systems. The result is a populace that is very comfortable in several languages, and mobile in a globalised world. The pull of opportunities was aided by the push from the government.

What sparks off debate

The heat in the language debate arises when one group ‘requires’ another to learn a particular language not their own, or denies them opportunities in the language of their choice. Parochialism comes in the way of understanding and petty preferences come to the fore.

A minister of the Tamil Nadu government, a couple of years ago, was launching a tie-up of a local university with an overseas institution and lauding the (English-Tamil) bilingual programme.

Not knowing when to stop, he was quoted as saying that with students now making a mark on the world stage with their access to English, what was the need for them to learn Hindi! Even though Subramania Bharati claimed that there is no language as sweet as Tamil, he was well-versed in Bengali, Hindi, Sanskrit and English.

The EU spends a pretty penny making available all laws and regulations in all the languages within its domain. And considerable subsidy is provided to encourage the learning of many of the languages of the union.

Increasingly, although many European universities use the local language for administrative purposes, they run bi-lingual business programmes and students are provided language instruction so that they improve their proficiency.

Bharathiar University in Coimbatore seems to be taking this route in choosing Tamil as its administrative language but offering courses and programmes in Tamil and English.

The pull of the native language is just too strong to be ignored and Greenland provides fresh fodder to the debate. This tiny country with a population of about 56,000 was, for years, a colony of Denmark.

On June 1, it was granted a high level of autonomy in its affairs, and chose to declare that Kalaallisut (Greenlandic) is now the official language. Danish, formerly the official language, will be the language of higher education and English is also widely spoken.

(The author is professor of international business and strategic management at Suffolk University, Boston, US.)

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