Michael Fry: Learn a new language and open up the world With fewer Scots able to speak in a foreign tongue, they will miss out on valuable experiences Bonne année! Prosit Neujahr! Buon anno! Próspero año nuevo! These New Year's greetings would be answered instantly and warmly by nearly a billion people in the world - those who have French, German, Italian or Spanish as their mother tongues. If I had added the Mandarin version (but cannot, because I do not know it), that would have put on another billion to the total of well-wishers. Unhappily, here in Scotland, where we like to think our New Year's greetings are the warmest, only a small and falling fraction of our mere five million are able to utter a phrase or even a word of any foreign language. So, as usual, we would have to bellow our greetings in English and hope non-Anglophones somehow get the message. Luckily we do possess a small and treasured diplomatic corps, some of whose representatives - the French, German, Italian, Spanish and Chinese consuls - are now appealing to the Scottish Government to do one of the things within its power to reverse the drastic decline among Scots of any knowledge of other peoples" languages. A cause and symptom of it is a catastrophic fall in the number of young foreign assistants who come here for a year in the course of their own studies to let our pupils hear and learn how a native speaker sounds: which, with all due respect to their hardworking Scottish teachers, will be a different and revealing experience from anything imparted through drilling in grammar and written exercises (if that is what schools still do). Seven years ago there were 284 foreign assistants. Today there are 59. Only seven of 32 local authorities in Scotland employ any at all. The consuls, backed by the British Council, are right to tackle the government of Scotland directly, because public policy has helped to bring about this misfortune. With our words we proclaim the value of linguistic versatility, undeniable in a nation priding itself on three idioms of its own. Yet our actions - through tough spending limits coupled with an end to ring-fencing of dedicated sums in local budgets - contradict our words. They have allowed councillors and officials (the last persons I would entrust with any cultural control) to slash something they regard as a useless luxury. The trend runs directly counter to the efforts of the Languages Working Group set up by the same Scottish Government with the ideal of making every schoolchild the master not just of one foreign tongue but of two. In other words, we have a silly little mess in policy; the results being precisely opposite to the aims. The responsible minister, Alasdair Allan, himself a linguist, will not be up to much if he fails to sort this detail out. Assuming we can get that detail right, it should still only form part of a wider picture. An argument advanced by the British Council was that Scotland does more than £4 billion worth of trade a year with the countries represented by the five consuls, one-fifth of all Scottish trade. It is hard to see how it cannot be a good thing to speak the language of the people you are trying to sell things to, even if the international medium of commercial communication is English: advantage is to be found at the margin, not in the mainstream. But if it were up to me, I would try to drum into the slack-jawed modern youth of Scotland how much personal benefit they can derive from knowledge of languages if they would only make the effort (a tall order, I know). By the time I left school I had a greater or lesser acquaintance with five languages besides English, three of them admittedly ancient, though even they have not proved entirely useless in later life. Without that knowledge, I would never have been invited on a Mediterranean cruise with French economists to extol to them the virtues of free markets (though I fear I did not get far with that). I would never have appeared on German television or broadcast on German radio. I would never have enjoyed a long chat with an old priest at Pecs in Hungary, after discovering we had a common language in Latin. In Greece they do not seem to understand my Greek, but at least I know not to swim or trespass where it may be risky. I must confess I have never found much use for my Hebrew, but at least I can quote the opening verses of Genesis ("In the beginning...") in the original version. As William Randolph Hearst said: "What an intro!" So perhaps it has helped me in my journalism. Since my salad days I have learned more, but I will not labour the point with examples of my Italian, Spanish or Arabic. The lesson is that facility in any other language than the mother tongue widens our experience: it opens up a whole world or worlds of which the individual would otherwise have been unaware. This always strikes me when in European languages I make use of the subjunctive mood of the verb, as I love to do. The subjunctive expresses possibility or conjecture or an entire range of other meanings concerned with the non-actual. Here is a world of personal hopes or dreams, or else of courteous concession to the partner in the conversation. The subjunctive used to exist in English: the phrase "if I were..." is about its last remnant. The nearest equivalent today would be found in the opening of sentences by our slack-jawed youth with "like" or "y'know" or "I mean" - or else, in cases of special epistemological complexity, "y'know what I mean." They say this because they cannot be bothered to work out in English what they do mean. But if they were required to express themselves in a foreign language they would have no other choice and, once formed, the habit would be good for them. Certainly, a great benefit of our learning a language is that it will make us better at expressing ourselves in our own mother tongue. Nothing so exposes lazy, slack and careless usage as the attempt to translate it into an alien idiom. I very much doubt if the memoirs of Tony Blair, for example, will ever appear in any other language than English. To see how a man capable of deceptively inspiring oratory could turn through translation into his true, turgid, ranting self, look out an English translation of Mein Kampf. At the very least, knowledge of a foreign tongue or tongues will extend our ability to use language, and the good use of language is in the end as much a moral as a practical cause.