Home Is Where the Tongue Is On the importance of languages in Europe

Nathan Domon

Only far from home can you fully appreciate the serenity and the tranquillity that flow from the mother tongue. Our first language is a place where the expression of feelings is effortless, unaffected, and sincere. Where eloquence and eccentricity are intuitive, and where authenticity is forged and revealed. A place with the Proustian ability to trigger vivid memories and keep the door to our past open. A place that carries the sound of home, with a hint of nostalgia.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein described language as a city you get to know by moving around it: you know your language like you know dead-end streets, secret alleys, connecting roads, worn-down steps,... It is a place that we have become familiar with over time. But it constitutes a sense of place that is deeper than location alone. It relates to identity and belonging, relationships and family, shared histories and moments. It is our intimate connection to the world around us, the glue that binds us together, no matter where we are. “My homeland is the French language”, declared the French author Albert Camus, born in Algeria, echoing the words of the Romanian philosopher in exile Emil Cioran: “one does not inhabit a country, but a language.” For people who, by choice or necessity, uproot themselves from their homes, the language can become a temporary refuge, a quiet place to retreat, a sanctuary where the mind speaks freely. “The language remains”, replied laconically Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt when asked about what was left of her pre-war feeling of home. Like the lighthouse in the storm, the language is what keeps alive the lights of home when we find ourselves adrift without bearings.

As globalisation swept the world, languages have become intrusive relics hindering trade and communication, causing unwelcome friction in the global village. With the spectre of a new Babel, English was quickly established as the only language that mattered globally, from science and business to culture and academia. The more languages, the more English. As such, the existence of a lingua franca facilitating the circulation of people, trade and ideas is not a bad thing; it is useful and necessary. But the pursuit of global interconnection becomes problematic when it means local impoverishment. And alienation from home.

On the Old Continent, this new industrial Esperanto permeates today every inch of daily life, slowly but steadily mutilating other languages: advertising is full of anglicisms, the syntax is more and more mimicking English grammar, and books are being assimilated into the denatured style of global English. Higher education in English is becoming the norm, and first language proficiency is declining. Global English has become a language killer that works at the expense of other languages. Knowledge of languages other than English is now seen as obsolete, if not a waste of time. Surveys show that while the number of Europeans who say they can speak English is on a constant rise, the number citing French, German or Russian is plunging. The study of foreign languages in secondary schools other than English is in decline everywhere, particularly in the United Kingdom. In plurilingual countries such as Switzerland and Belgium, English is now preferred for communication between the different linguistic regions. This is even more ridiculous in areas with closely related languages, like in Scandinavia, where the custom of two people speaking their native language and still understanding each other is no longer the norm because of the rise of English. The major problem is that language education has lost its original purpose: learning a new language has been reduced to a symbol of personal growth or a way to improve CV, no longer a demonstration of intellectual curiosity or admiration for other cultures. on of an inclusive lingua franca, it would be naive to celebrate it as a form of benevolent internationalism including everyone. The linguistic delocalisation benefits the global nomads and the well-educated city-dwellers, but it alienates large parts of local communities who do not find the serenity to speak the language of Shakespeare – this concerns mainly vulnerable and disadvantaged groups, such as unskilled workers, migrants, ethnic minorities, elderly people, and rural communities. For them, the pervasiveness of English foreshadows a grim future where the language may be turned into a weapon of discrimination and exclusion in the job market, higher education, and public institutions. Speak English or die. We should not underestimate the symbolic violence of this linguistic disarray and the disruptions that it will bring. Do we measure the risks when those who do not speak English have become linguistic second-class citizens at home? The Dutch far-right figure Thiery Baudet has built an audience with populist tropes about the “elite’s oikophobia” –the fear of home… As the tragic history of our continent shows, when people feel in exile in their own land, language fetishism can easily fall into the wrong hands and be used for disastrous purposes.

These trends reflect the slow erosion of the consideration for other languages and cultures in Europe. Studying abroad is no longer about immersing oneself in a culture, a history, and a lifestyle but boosting English credentials for the global job market – in the Netherlands, where higher education is almost exclusively in English, most exchange students cannot even order a coffee in Dutch by the time they graduate.

When it comes to literary translation – the pinnacle of cultural exchanges – most novels are only translated into English or directly from the English version rather than the original language, which leads to an absurd game of Chinese whispers where the translator does not even speak a word of the author’s mother tongue. The foreign bookstore – another crossroad of cultures – is becoming an endangered species – in France, the last German bookstore shut down in 2020. The elite no longer bothers to learn the languages of their neighbours either, as used to be the custom. Attend international panel discussions, art exhibitions, or business conferences, and you will see non-English speakers do their utmost to speak dumbed-down broken English, only saying what they can, not what they want. The demeaning submissive tendency of the elite culminates undoubtedly within the Brussels bubble, where the language of Brexit has become virtually compulsory, despite being the mother tongue of less than 1% of EU citizens. Besides the risk of uniformisation of thought, this capitulation casts doubt on Eurocrats’ ability to represent and understand ordinary Europeans.

“Because of indifference and negligence, English, the enlightened despot of the happy globalisation, has become an absolute ruler in Europe, a loudmouth and ruthless monarch that has relegated other languages to the status of quasi-dialect.”

Europe’s language was supposed to be translation: it has now become monolingual. For the blind Europhiles, this linguistic no-man’s land is the price to pay for a united Europe. But while the omnipresence of English may give the impressi-

George Steiner, the quintessential European humanist, warned us that “nothing threatens Europe more radically ‘at the roots’ than the detergent, exponential tide of Anglo-American, and of the uniform values and world-image which that devouring esperanto brings with it… Europe will indeed perish if it does not fight for its languages, local traditions and social autonomies.” By draining our continent of its colours, nuances and quirks, by creating artificial links and cutting off real roots, the rise of English as the only European language may well spoil what we crave the most: a feeling of home.