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Five years since secondary school pupils were allowed to drop languages after the age of 14, the number of young people taking a modern foreign language at GCSE has slumped. The Government currently has no plans to make languages a compulsory subject again, preferring instead to make them available to all primary schoolchildren. But there are new initiatives afoot to encourage secondary school pupils to learn foreign languages.

athryn Board is the chief executive at Cilt, the National Centre for Languages, which is working to motivate young people through initiatives such as the annual Language and Film Talent Awards (Laftas). She says the removal of foreign languages as a compulsory element of education for children older than 14 puts British youngsters at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to carving out international careers. But her message is more about using language-learning to boost employability, literacy and reading skills than attempting to push school-leavers into specialised languages-based careers.

While our sometimes smug attitude to foreign languages rests on the belief that the rest of the world speaks English, this is no longer the case, according to Cilt.In 2000, 51 per cent of internet use was in English, but this figure has now dropped in favour of Chinese and Arabic. While English remains a key language of business for the present, it is quite possible that Mandarin will overtake it."Less than 7 per cent of the world speaks English as a first language and 75 per cent of the world's population don't speak any English at all," says Board, "so to assume that our mother tongue is sufficient to get by in most circumstances simply isn't true any more." If, at a time of increased globalisation, being able to offer at least a smattering of someone else's language puts you ahead of the game in all sorts of different walks of life, then in terms of popularity, languages are at an all-time low.