Don’t lament the sunset of imperial language departments

During my 30 years at different universities across the world, I have read many laments for the closure of modern languages departments.

Those that have followed Cardiff University’s proposal to end its language programmes fit the pattern, insisting that understanding non-anglophone cultures is impossible without a deep grasp of their languages. An article published in Times Higher Education also suggests that it is unethical, demonstrating “an indifference to both linguistic and viewpoint diversity. Worse still, it would impose an anglo-normative framework on the cultural realities being examined.”

I agree. Yet language departments in their current guise do not address this deficiency, either. Their high-minded entitlement to a good chunk of their universities’ budgets typically translates into teaching and research in just five or six mainly European post/imperial languages.

As Japan grew into a major economic power in the last third of the 20th century, Japanese began to be offered more widely. Likewise for Chinese in the early 2010s. And the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya generated a boom in Arabic and Persian (Farsi) language and culture studies. But Arabic and Japanese are also post/imperial languages, while Chinese and Persian are unabashedly imperial.

True, like French, Spanish, Russian and Portuguese, they are widely spoken. But so are Hindi, Bengali, Swahili and Hausa. Yet these are only offered within specialist area studies programmes, not as default options in modern languages departments.

And this situation endures in a world where information is regularly published in 600 languages, with 100 different writing systems. Yes, most internet applications are still heavily skewed in favour of Eurasian idioms, but more African, American and Australasian languages are gradually appearing. There are Wikipedias in more than 330 languages, Google Translate supports 249, while Duolingo offers its online teaching service in 42 languages.

A wider variety of languages are also being used for official state business. While Latin was the sole language of administration, education and book production across most of Europe until the 17th century, the European Union now uses 24 languages for official business.

In short, by refusing to embrace this multilingual digital reality, modern languages departments – consciously or not – serve to justify and preserve cultural (linguistic) imperialism.

They are also making themselves irrelevant. Researching European politics through the lens of even a couple of languages is methodologically fraught to say the least. The same is true of research on such a polyglot country like India. And as Africa’s exploding demographics and economic development power it on to the global scene, no one will be able to do business successfully there without some facility in its relevant languages.

Some readers will instantly respond: “But offering more languages would be way too expensive – especially now! Offering 50 languages would require 50 lectors and a fivefold increase in the department’s budget. Expand that to the 600 languages into which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was translated and you would not only bankrupt the department but possibly the whole university!”

But that is to maintain outmoded thinking about what a modern languages department should be. I believe they should recast themselves primarily as brokers, serving the linguistic needs of staff and students in other departments. As such, they need not directly employ many staff at all.

Researching printed sources usually only requires a basic understanding of the language in question, for instance. Indeed, even professional book translators may not be fluent speakers (as opposed to readers) of the language they work with. Few students or researchers really need or want to acquire a tongue to near-native fluency in all its aspects.

Each year (or even each semester), modern languages departments should establish students’ and researchers’ specific language needs and then contract appropriate services. Some of these could be from language agencies, whose specialists are used to being paid by the hour. Most of it could be delivered online from abroad, where salary demands are likely to be lower. But it could also be contracted from immigrant communities, some of whose members may be doing menial jobs but are trained educators and very knowledgeable about their home and ethnic languages.

Close cooperation is also needed with IT departments (which already amount to brokering agencies, providing services and skills for students and staff in other departments). We must face the fact that during the past decade machine translation has improved considerably, even encroaching on the hallowed grounds of literary translation. This service, coupled with GPT-style AI solutions, powers instantaneous translation of documents and websites – including those of prestigious newspapers such as Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El Pais.

Students need to learn how to use technology to deal with multilingual material. No one will ever acquire more than five to 10 languages for reading purposes. But if the material at hand is in 40 unrelated languages than machine translation is the only sensible option.

Technology also underpins the Kremlin’s highly polyglot anti-Western propaganda and influence campaigns. These should be closely watched and researched by universities, particularly given predictions that Russia may soon attack a Nato nation. Graduates of such programmes would be highly attractive to intelligence agencies, which often have to rely currently on naturalised immigrants, whose loyalty cannot be guaranteed.

Learning a language is really a matter of training your neuromuscular memory, like learning to ride a bike. And as a 2023 article in THE pointed out, this will “only take you so far in appreciating the intricacy with which people living in different parts of the globe make sense of the realities that they inhabit”. But so will learning one or two European languages. And other departments can train students in critical thinking and other “higher-order abilities” – although nothing stops a university from having a specialised department of translation studies or of Scandinavian culture and history.

Modern languages must adapt – both to universities’ financial realities and to wider society’s technologically turbocharged future. If they don’t, the closures will just keep on coming, and deservedly so.

Tomasz Kamusella is reader in the School of History at the University of St Andrews.