To say ‘This is England, we speak English’ has always been historically ignorant. What better way to show hope for the future than to learn to communicate with a wider world?
- Dr John Gallagher
The Elizabethan teacher and translator John Florio wasn’t the sort of person who sugar-coated his opinions. In 1578, he complained about the Englishmen he saw in the company of foreigners, ‘who can neither speak, nor understand with them, but stands as one mute’ – this poor monoglot Englishman is ‘mocked of them, and despised of all’. ‘What a shame is that?’ asks Florio – ‘what a reproach to his parents? what a loss to him? and what heart’s grief to think thereon?’ Florio’s England is not ours, but his exasperation might sound familiar.
When I tell people that I study the history of foreign-language learning in England, they often ask whether the English ever learnt other languages at all. Our idea of the English as a monoglot nation, though, is a modern one – Florio lived in an era long before English was an international lingua franca, when anyone who wanted to trade or to travel had to become a language-learner. Even English merchants, he wrote, had no use for English when they were out of the country: ‘it liketh them not, and they do not speak it’.
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Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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