The British media has got into one of its regular period funks about Britons not learning foreign languages. As the only monoglot in a family of polyglots, it is an issue I have had a lifelong sensitivity about. But as always, the national hand-wringing displays more ignorance than insight.

The wailing follows a regular pattern – we Brits are lazy, it damages our international reputation, and is bad for the economy. But given that our children are leading the Western world in reading, writing and arithmetic, it is unlikely that they are noticeably more lazy than those of other countries.

A slightly more sophisticated argument points out that since our mother tongue is the global lingua franca – the language of business, of science, of tourism, of international pop music and film – we h

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