Oxford has always provided a home for cunning linguists, and not just within the columns of Creaming Spires. In the past, they brought a welcome hint of the exotic to student life, with their carelessly dropped foreign phrases (“Some vodka? Just a soupçon”, “Your shoes are so zeitgeist”, “Pulling an all-nighter – big essay due mañana” etc.). They had picked up some cool tat and a snappy hair cut from their time on whatever language exchange they had been sent on, and could be seen ostentatiously posing with foreign language newspapers (many of them held the right way up) in cafés all over Oxford.
But the days when the Continent was isolated by fog on the Channel are long gone. Let’s face facts. The world is full of people who speak foreign languages better than language students, and as Herr and Frau Farage remind us, so is the UK. If you want to hang out with students with exotic accents, and funny-sounding phrases, just ask the French PPE student, Mexican physicist or German classicist who is out-performing you in tutorials to drop their flawless English for 5 minutes, and give you a burst of their native tongue. They will smoke their Gauloise or Fiesta with infinitely more aplomb than their ersatz UK equivalents (see how catching that phrase dropping can be) and their complaints about the food, plumbing and British teeth ring with authenticity.
There would be other considerable benefits from getting rid of language degrees. Prominent among them is losing the interminable boasting about what they are going to do on their year abroad, just as the rest of us are rapidly going pale at the looming awfulness of finals and the futile search for a job. We don’t care that they are spending six months yak farming in the Urals, or have secured a secondment to command the Uruguayan navy. It would also spare us the bathetic fall which inevitably follows that bombast when they return after a year away to discover that all their friendship group has moved on, and they find themselves desperately trying to ingratiate themselves with the other zombie-undergraduates such as Chemists and Classicist they would not have been seen dead with 12 months before. So it is au revoir to linguists?
No linguists. It’s goodbye.
