MEITS Blog

With the resumption of Parliament on Wednesday 25 September, the importance of how we use language came sharply into focus. In the highly charged atmosphere of the House of Commons, one MP warned against the dangers of using ‘offensive, dangerous or inflammatory language’. Speaking on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, Brendan Cox, husband of the murdered MP Jo Cox, put succinctly the reason why this important: ‘because it has real world consequences’. How we use languages – and which languages we choose to learn and to speak – identifies who we are, how we view the world, and how we relate to others. Language matters.

French grammar – and the difficulty of acquiring the rules of le bon usage or correct usage – is once again in the news. Two schoolteachers from Belgium have had the audacity to suggest that the rules for past participle agreement with the verb avoir ‘to have’ should be simplified. Why? Because learning these rules takes some 80 hours of teaching in school, and this time, the teachers argue, could be better spent on other things. 

In October 2015 we organised the first National Languages Workshop in Cambridge, with help from the Cambridge Strategic Research Initiative in Public Policy and the Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP). It comprised an open session in the morning with a series of presentations from representatives of different government departments, and a closed session under Chatham House rules in the afternoon. As a result, we produced a policy document, the Value of Languages.