Parlez-vous fran?ais? No, but my AI can. Is this the end for foreign language learning? England’s school-leaving A-level exam results this week included a 1.5 per cent yearly drop in entries for modern foreign languages, with sharp falls in French and German, extending a long downward trend. Student and teacher numbers have dwindled so far that some leading UK universities are looking at merging their language courses. Britons, like Americans, have long been linguistic laggards, sheltering behind English’s status as the global language of business and popular culture. Internationally, demand to learn English, and expanding languages such as Mandarin, remains robust. Even so, young people may question the need when translation apps can do the job. Une grosse erreur!

In England, the language downturn in schools accelerated after the Blair government in 2004 ill-advisedly stopped requiring students to study a foreign language for exams at 16. An understandable push in maths, technology and science subjects has led to spin-off declines in some other humanities, too.

Yet beyond UK schools the picture is more positive. Adult language classes report healthy demand; 2023 polling for the British Academy found 71 per cent of Britons would support making language study compulsory in schools. Across the EU, nearly half of all pupils in upper secondary education learn two or more foreign languages.