Slovenian is to become the third working language of the European Union during the country’s six-month EU presidency in the first half of 2008. It is probably too late to attempt a crash course, especially if you have no previous acquaintance of Slavic languages.

Every working language of the EU requires the services of 80 interpreters and, so far, the Commission has found 54 with fluency in Slovenian.

More will be required, a job for Leonard Orban, of Romania, who is the European Commissioner for Multilingualism. His job is more than a Brussels joke because language is fast becoming a hot issue in the EU, and not only because English is rapidly eclipsing French as the first language within the European bureaucracy.

The minister for many tongues wants to improve the knowledge of languages, in particular among businesses. English is fine but not enough, he reckons, brandishing a study, which concludes that more than a tenth of small and medium-sized EU exporters are losing business because they lack language skills.

English is large but not universal. In parts of Africa, French is more useful, Spanish has hegemony in Latin America and in parts of California, and in Eastern Europe, Russian or German is often more helpful.

The problem is acknowledged ritually in Britain, where breasts are beaten over the nation’s linguistic ineptitude. Now and then an eye-catching but improbable initiative is mooted (but never adequately funded) to promote the learning of languages. Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, wants to encourage pupils to learn languages that are more exotic than dull old French and German, such as Mandarin, Arabic, Urdu or Bengali. German GCSE passes have fallen by a third since 1996, but if we offered Chinese or Arabic, Mr Johnson believes, we could make up the figures. The idea, if it is such, is that businesses need different language skills. Money is the big language motivator, the minister believes. The truth is that firms sometimes do need proficiency in Asian languages. It beggars belief, however, that an Education Department that has watched with indifference the wholesale collapse of language skills among school-leavers could begin to teach a difficult language, such as Mandarin, to any standard to a significant number of pupils.

Learning a language is not only the mental imprinting of a new code. (If it were that, surely the first priority would be to make foreign languages compulsory at infant school, when the brain is at its most receptive.) It is about learning modes of address, speech patterns, mimicry of sounds and facial gestures and humour. Language is about culture as much as it is about code.

The British, who ought best to know this, understand it least. The invasion of foreign cultures has helped English to thrive but, at its most basic (the level at which it is most commonly spoken in Britain), English is a brutal, guttural, sometimes obscene Germanic tongue with little grammar, quick to learn to superficial competence and easy to understand. Thus, English thrives as the language of commerce and science. It is fast, efficient, precise – the best language for a contract. But the cultivation of long-term business relationships requires more than efficiency. The subtle appreciation of sentiments and prejudices cloaked in another language requires more lengthy study than a pass at GCSE.

If you visit the Beijing or Shanghai office of a large US or EU multinational, you are likely to meet the person who is the cultural bridge. Nearly always a woman, she frequently has her feet planted in two worlds. She is fluent in two languages and has a useful knowledge of the gatekeepers in the Chinese bureaucracy.

This is much deeper than language. If Alan Johnson wants a generation of culturally aware, polyglot British businessmen, he should stick to French and German. We are not even there yet.

carl.mortished@thetimes.co.uk

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