Preparing for War: the British and Foreign Languages

Abstract

‘We inhabit an island and have no familiar contact with other peoples who cannot understand our tongue’ (Leathes 1928: 17). So said Sir Stanley Leathes, the chair of the Modern Studies Committee, set up by the Government in July 1916 to examine those deficiencies in the British educational system which the First World War experience had recently revealed. It was widely felt that an inability to understand allies and enemies, and to communicate with them, had left Britain radically unprepared for the 1914–18 war (Bayley 1991). The assumption that underlined this part of Leathes’ investigation was that cultural isolation might be an inhibitor of efficient war-making; that there was some sort of relationship between the cultural knowledge about foreign friends and allies which Britons possessed, and their ability to speak the native languages of these ‘other peoples’. Some 23 years later, as the world moved towards another conflict, the country faced much the same issues of how to engage with foreigners in war. Finding out information about the enemy, communicating with allies, preparing for operations on the Continent would all necessarily involve the British in processes in which foreign languages were deeply embedded and where some measure of cultural knowledge might prove to be vital to the success of future war efforts.