Languages will continue to diverge. Even if English were to become the universal language, it would still take many different forms. (46) {{U}}Indeed the same could happen to English as has happened to Chinese: a language of intellectuals which doesn' t vary hugely alongside a large number of variants used by local peoples.{{/U}}
We will continue to teach other languages in some form, and not just for reasons of practicality. Learning a language is good for your mental health; it forces you to understand another cultural and intellectual system. So I hope British education will develop a more rational approach to the foreign languages available to students in line with their political importance. Because so many people believe it' s no longer important to know another language, I fear that time devoted to language teaching in schools may well continue to decline. (47) {{U}}But you can argue that learning another language well is more taxing than, say, learning to play chess well—it involves sensitivity to a set of complicated rules, and also to context.{{/U}}
Technology will certainly make a difference to the use of foreign languages. (48) {{U}}Computers may, for instance, alleviate the drudgery that a vast translation represents.{{/U}} But no one who has seen a computer translation will think it can substitute for live knowledge of the different languages. A machine will always be behind the times. (49) {{U}}Still more important is the fact that no computer will ever get at the associations beyond the words associations that may not be expressed but which carry much of the meaning.{{/U}} In languages like Arabic that context is very important. Languages come with heavy cultural baggage too--in French or German if you miss the cultural references behind a word you' re very likely to be missing the meaning. It will be very hard to teach all that to a computer.
(50) {{U}}All the predictions are that English will be spoken by a declining proportion of the world' s population in the 21st century.{{/U}} I don't think foreign languages will really become less important, but they might be perceived to be—and that would in the end be a very bad thing.