We should be grateful for lovers of language - wherever they learn

Among the tributes to playwright Tom Stoppard, who died last month aged 88, was an extraordinary story told by a professor of surgery who experienced what he called a “Damascene conversion” during the opening run of Arcadia in the early 1990s. Michael Baum, a professor emeritus at University College London, went to see the play with his wife while trying to better understand the behaviour of breast cancer. In act one, the characters Thomasina and Septimus discuss chaos theory, something Baum said had caused him to reassess how cancer spreads around the body and ultimately led to a breakthrough in chemotherapy. “Stoppard never learnt how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia,” Baum wrote in a letter to The Times. 

Setting aside why the professor was unable to write and tell Stoppard of his role in this medical marvel, the story nevertheless provides an insight into the prodigious mind of an autodidact with an insatiable curiosity for the world around him, someone who was not only revered in the theatre but much in demand in Hollywood, winning an Oscar for his Shakespeare in Love script and writing dialogue for blockbusters such as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

I met Stoppard once, at the Scottish Parliament, where he joined his friend Jan Culik, a lecturer at the University of Glasgow, to talk about the importance of protecting the study of foreign languages. Stoppard, who was born Tomáš Sträussler in the former Czechoslovakia, came to Britain after his family fled the Nazi occupation. He worked with Culik on Rock ‘n’ Roll, a freewheeling play concerned with the significance of popular music in the years between the 1968 Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Its eclectic references to the Rolling Stones, Syd Barrett, Vaclav Havel, and the poetry of Sappho are illustrative of Stoppard’s scope, his deep fascination with popular culture and its political significance.   

Stoppard and Culik were at the parliament giving evidence in support of a petition calling for better funding for lesser taught languages such as Russian, Czech and Polish at Scottish universities. As someone who studied Russian at a Scottish university, I took more than a passing interest. Sadly, even with Stoppard’s celebrity backing, they could not save Glasgow University’s Slavonic Studies programme, which closed to new entrants the following year, although the institution still offers courses in east European languages.

In the years since there has been a whittling away of modern languages in universities. Many post-1992 universities (former colleges or polytechnics) have completely cut their languages degrees. At the University of Aberdeen a plan to scrap modern languages degrees caused representatives of the French, German, Spanish and Italian governments to protest alongside thousands who signed a petition against the proposal. The institution later backtracked slightly, continuing to offer languages as part of joint-honour degree programmes, with a review of the original decision finding it had been “hurried, unstructured, and dominated by immediate financial considerations”.

Those decisions are, of course, predicated on demand, with fewer undergraduates opting to study a modern language. That undoubtedly reflects the predominance of English, which now more than ever is the lingua franca of business, science and politics. But it may also reflect the growing insularity of post-Brexit Britain, where previous student exchange programmes such as Erasmus have ended and where young people can no longer easily move to live and work in mainland Europe as older generations once took for granted. 

Language can be incredibly emotive – just look at the backlash among certain sections of the population at moves to safeguard Gaelic and Scots. Thankfully, the Scottish Government has ignored those voices, pushing ahead with the Scottish Languages Act, which recognises both Gaelic and Scots as official languages. As with the study of all languages, learning Gaelic is far more than memorising vocabulary and grammar rules. It’s about gaining a deeper cultural understanding of the country in which we live – its history, its place names, its continued influence on the way we Scots speak English.

And there are many young Scots now learning English as a second language. In Glasgow, for example, there are nearly 22,000 pupils for whom their home language is different to the one they learn in school, with Urdu, Arabic, Polish, Punjabi and Mandarin the most common. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage calls this the “cultural smashing of Glasgow” and yet members of his party have sought to undermine classes where English is taught to the parents of these children as they attempt to assimilate themselves into Scottish society. 

Stoppard, a child refugee who spoke Czech until the age of four, knew better than anyone the power language has to shape, change, even save lives. Learning to speak a foreign tongue is an experience of self-empowerment, self-enrichment – we should be grateful for those who embark upon it, whether they are learning Russian or French at university or English in a school or community centre.