IF AN Englishman wants to speak a foreign language, runs the old joke, he can always go abroad and speak English. Over the past decade the number of secondary-school children in Britain passing exams in modern languages has almost halved. Just 30% bother with French, by far the favourite second language (see chart). On March 22nd a House of Lords committee called for compulsory language-learning in primary and secondary schools. English schoolchildren are not utterly monolingual. Comparatively rapid immigration in the past decade means 15% of children attending schools in England speak a different language at home. In central London more than half do. This helps flatter the language-learning figures. Polish, Portuguese and Arabic are more popular, although their rise has hardly countered the falls in French and German. Some schools enter children for exams in their native tongue without having taught them in it. This boosts the confidence of a newly arrived child - and the school's ranking in league tables. Part of the reason for the decline of modern languages is that the rewards of speaking in a second tongue diminish as more people in other countries speak English. Another is simply that learning languages is hard and tends to happen only if schools or the state insist on it. In 2004 the government removed the legal compulsion to teach foreign languages past the age of 14. Just 23% of state schools now ask their pupils to be proficient in a second language at the age of 16, compared with 82% of private schools. In 2010 the education secretary, Michael Gove, found a ruse to reverse the decline: he published data showing how few pupils passed GCSE exams in traditional subjects, including a language. That appears to have been effective: a recent survey by CfBT, a charity, found that 40% of schools reported a rise in the number of pupils studying languages. New pressure comes from universities, the pickiest of which like to admit polyglots. They have long demanded minimum entry standards in English and maths; from September University College London will insist that entrants from schools that teach modern languages have learned one, too. Any monoglots will be asked to enroll in language classes once they have arrived. Michael Worton, UCL's vice-provost, reckons that knowing a foreign language enables people to appreciate different cultures. Perhaps, but many young Britons are unimpressed by such woolly claims. They will learn other languages only if forced.