My roots read like a World Cup draw. My half-Welsh father was born and spent his boyhood in Argentina and thus speaks Spanish almost as naturally as English. My mother’s family are Norwegian.
Because Dad was a diplomat, I spent the first five years of my life in Moscow and Lisbon, so my baby-talk was Russian (in which I later got an O-Level) and I then spoke kindergarten Portuguese.
I was sent to boarding school in the days when they still provided a classical education, so I learned Latin and Ancient Greek to what was then O-Level standard, but would now be A-Level, at least. I also got an A in A-Level French, which is the one foreign language I can claim to speak with reasonable fluency.
Global reach: English is the second language of 85 per cent of Europeans, and the default tongue of the European UnionWhile I was growing up, my family also lived in Peru and Cuba, but I only went out there on holidays, so my Spanish is rudimentary at best. Having spent the past couple of years writing novels set in Germany, however, I now have a tiny smattering of German, too.
Given this absurdly multi-lingual background, you might think I’d be distraught at hearing that 380,000 teenagers in England did not take a single language at GCSE last year. Department for Education figures show that fewer and fewer of us are learning a foreign language, while more and more foreigners are becoming multi-lingual. This, say distraught commentators, will condemn us pathetic Little Englanders to a live of dismal isolation while our educated, sophisticated, Euro-competitors chat away to foreign customers and steal all our business as a result.
In fact, I think those pupils who don’t learn other languages are making an entirely sensible decision. Learning foreign languages is a pleasant form of intellectual self-improvement: a genteel indulgence like learning to embroider or play the violin. A bit of French or Spanish comes in handy on holiday if you’re the sort of person who likes to reassure the natives that you’re more sophisticated than the rest of the tourist herd. But there’s absolutely no need to learn any one particular language unless you’ve got a specific professional use for it.
More from David Thomas... On the 20th anniversary of the first mobile phone text message... How texting made history but ruined our language- and plenty of marriages! 02/12/12 Why can't we all just stop texting and have an actual face-to-face conversation for once? 18/07/12 Why I’m going into battle with Google to find out if it stole my family’s secrets 13/06/12 Why I hate the snobbery and elitism of the 'anti-elitist' BBC 07/06/12 Say what you like about the French, but they have the world's finest political crumpet 24/05/12 A memo to the sweaty, Lycra-clad bike brigade: The rules of the road apply to you, too 15/05/12 The anti-fat campaign is just fat-headed 10/05/12 Dwain Chambers is no dope: Why reformed drug cheats have the right to be Olympians 30/04/12 With apologies to St George - patron saint of a country that seems to be dying of shame 23/04/12 VIEW FULL ARCHIVEConsider the maths. There are roughly 6,900 living languages in the world. Europe alone has 234 languages spoken on a daily basis. So even if I was fluent in all the languages I’ve ever even begun to tackle, I’d only be able to speak to a minority of my fellow-Europeans in their mother tongues. And that’s before I’d so much as set foot in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
The planet’s most common first language is Mandarin Chinese, which has around 850 million speakers. Clearly, anyone seeking to do business in the massive Chinese market would do well to brush up on their Mandarin, although they might need a bit of help with those hundreds of millions of Chinese whose preferred dialect is Cantonese.
The only problem is that Mandarin is not spoken by anyone who is not Chinese, so it’s not much use in that equally significant 21st century powerhouse, India. Nor does learning one of the many languages used on the sub-Continent help one communicate with Arab or Turkish or Swahili-speakers.
There is, however, one language that does perform the magic trick of uniting the entire globe. If you ever go, as I have done, to one of the horrendous international junkets which film studios hold to promote their latest blockbusters, you’ll encounter a single extraordinary language that, say, the Brazilian, Swedish, Japanese and Italian reporters use both to chat with one another and question the American stars.
This is the language of science, commerce, global politics, aviation, popular music and, above all, the internet. It’s the language that 85 per cent of all Europeans learn as their second language; the language that has become the default tongue of the EU; the language that President Sarkozy of France uses with Chancellor Merkel of Germany when plotting how to stitch up the British.
This magical language is English. It unites the whole world in the way no other language can. It’s arguably the major reason why our little island has such a disproportionately massive influence on global culture: from Shakespeare to Harry Potter, from James Bond to the Beatles.
All those foreigners who are so admirably learning another language are learning the one we already know. So our school pupils don’t need to learn any foreign tongues. They might, of course, do well to become much, much better at speaking, writing, spelling and generally using English correctly. But that’s another argument altogether.