How to Nurture Speakers of ‘Difficult’ Languages
Governments and companies need to work out how to manage multilingual staff
By Michael Skapinker
The UK Foreign Office has made a big effort to improve diplomats’ language skills, only to see it undone by staff rotations and expulsions.
After re-opening its in-house language school, the Foreign Office says 55 per cent of diplomats who need languages for their roles now have them, up from 39 per cent in 2015. The level in Mandarin is almost 70 per cent, but, according to a parliamentary report last week, there are problems with Russian and Arabic.
About two-thirds of the British diplomats expelled by Moscow after the alleged Russian attack in Salisbury this year were Russian speakers. Only 30 per cent of UK diplomats who need Arabic for their jobs can manage in the language, although the number was 49 per cent as recently as December last year. The reason for the fall is that Arabic-speaking diplomats had been rotated to other posts.
The problem is not confined to the diplomatic service or to the UK. Foreign language skills in English-speaking countries are dire. Fewer than one-third of 16-year-olds in England achieve a decent grade in a foreign language. Fewer than a quarter of US school students study another…
