This article is taken from the February 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
This is Global Britain, we’re so often told, and higher education plays a major role. Our universities are “the envy of the world”, hosting 750,000 international students who make up a quarter of their cohorts. But despite welcoming this manifestly multicultural, multilingual audience, our universities are rapidly losing the very faculty for speaking foreign languages.
Yes, our universities constantly clamour for closer relations with Europe, and are now set to rejoin the EU’s Erasmus+ student scheme in 2027. Yet never have so few students been learning the languages of the Continent.
The decline is shocking. 25 years ago, 105 UK universities offered modern language degrees to some 160,000 students. Now, despite the subsequent growth of the overall student body, we have lost 100,000 language learners: in 2023–24, 63,000 undergraduates were pursuing “language and area studies”, many of which are not primarily involved with modern language learning.
In turn, modern language departments are closing with alarming regularity: amongst the post-1992 universities there have been 28 closures, 11 in the last decade. Only seven of the 70 institutions in this category still offer multiple modern languages.
The Russell Group is holding up rather better, but even there alarm bells are starting to sound. The University of Nottingham suspended most of its modern language courses last year: since only four of them had more than ten students, the administrators’ conclusion was predictable: “Our modern languages degree courses are unsustainable.”
But is that really a foregone conclusion, or could language teaching be recalibrated as an emergency priority?
This decline in universities reflects an even starker loss of modern languages in secondary schools. In 2002, 76 per cent of pupils took at least one foreign language GCSE — a respectable proportion. Two years later, that spectacular philistine, Charles Clarke, used his power as Labour’s education secretary to abolish the compulsory study of a foreign language up to 16.
By 2010, the GCSE uptake had fallen to 43 per cent; despite that figure stabilising, it remains true that most teenagers take no foreign language GCSE. Two thirds of UK secondary schools teach only one foreign language, and more than a third of schools don’t offer any foreign language in Year 9 (age 14).
The numbers for French and German are especially grim. In 2004, 318,000 students took GCSE French; in 2024, just 128,000. In German, the decline is steeper still: 122,000 to 32,000. A-Levels suffer in turn: less than 3 per cent of all enrolments are now in modern foreign languages.
When Cardiff University tried to shut down its modern languages department, external pressure forced a U-turn
Although UK employers report that the language most sought after is German, not even 2,500 students now study it at A-Level. (Over five times as many study PE.)
Here someone might mumble that there has been some recent growth in Chinese, Arabic and Spanish. But the first two are driven by native speakers plucking the low-hanging fruit, and the last is — yo digo la verdad — the easiest of the traditional European languages on offer.
It is so easy for universities to lay blame elsewhere. The students stopped taking the language courses. Because schools stopped teaching the languages. Because schools all thought the languages were too difficult. Because exam results were worse than for other subjects. Because standards of accuracy and excellence are clear and non-negotiable in language learning.
All true enough, but many good things are hard and necessary and worth defending. Yes, schools should prepare a suitable proportion of their students for higher education. But if the universities lower or jettison their own standards, schools and syllabuses will inevitably rein in their own ambitions.
Since fewer students now possess a high degree of linguistic fluency, no university feels it has the time or resources to train people up to where they used to be. But without that knowledge, the whole study of foreign cultures collapses. It cannot survive in translation.
Many universities celebrate their pivot to “Institution-Wide Language Provision”. Yet, as a service just to teach the languages, it not only does nothing to stop the demise of the serious study of other cultures, but actually catalyses their collapse by the wholesale reallocation of resources.
Many recognise the dangers of this drift. Remarkably, when the wonks at Cardiff University tried to shut down its modern languages department, external pressure forced them to perform a striking U-turn. This really was a matter of national significance, as three-fifths of Welsh modern language students are enrolled there.
To write well, and to wield English with the skill it demands, you need to know a foreign language. Translation tools, or AI that can take the initiative unprompted, do nothing to change that human truth. So who will help Global Britain speak with more than one voice?
