Every September, as the new school term begins, the press reach for the same tired filler. Cue the Daily Mail or the Telegraph running a piece about a school—usually in London or Birmingham—where pupils supposedly speak “100 languages.”
It makes for a good headline, but it’s nonsense. Try it yourself: write down 100 languages. After 20 or 30, most people grind to a halt. Even the United Nations only recognises six official languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.
So how do we get to these fantastical figures? The trick is that one speaker often counts for several languages. Someone who grew up with Serbo-Croat can now claim Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin as separate entries. Multiply that sleight of hand across a school population and the numbers inflate fast.
But there’s a deeper absurdity. I speak some Spanish and intermediate Japanese. My daughter has GCSE Mandarin and French. My son has GCSE Mandarin and is fluent in Jedi and the Black Speech of Mordor. Dinner conversations could be chaos—except we all also speak English.
That’s the point. English remains the common thread, even in schools with wide linguistic diversity. And if you want a school where pupils genuinely speak dozens of languages between them, look not at a London comprehensive but at Eton, where children of the global elite swap between French, German, Latin and Greek without raising an eyebrow.
This is one of the quirks of our class system. Speaking multiple foreign languages is a sign of sophistication if posh people do it, but is deeply suspect for anyone else.
Because these headlines aren’t really about languages at all. They’re about immigration. They are designed to push the buttons of a small but loud minority who fear foreigners and imagine their communities under siege.
The establishment press, and much of online media, know exactly what they are doing. They feed those anxieties, amplify outrage, and dress it up as a quirky back-to-school feature.
It’s lazy journalism. Worse, it’s journalism that nudges public opinion in toxic directions. The real story isn’t “100 languages in a school.” The real story is how easily the myth of 100 languages in British schools gets recycled to fuel anti-immigrant sentiment.
I haven’t bought a newspaper in almost 20 years. I feel better for it.
Despite that I remember a copy of the Daily Mail getting the better of me on a long train ride when my phone battery had died. Out of boredom I had a flick through. One of the stories was about a man who was prosecuted for a hate crime because he left a ham sandwich on the steps of a mosque . I thought to myself that can’t be right, so when I got internet access I checked the local court records. The guy was prosecuted for a hate crime, but in addition to ham sandwich he also tied bacon to the mosque doorhandles and tied a St Georges cross to railings with ‘No Mosques’ written on it.
But the tabloids don’t like the facts get in the way of a good morale outrage.
It’s getting worse. Increasingly the Mail and the Telegraph rely on social media to set the news agenda, which means they publish stories which aren’t properly fact checked. Just look at the Telegraph’s list of corrections and retractions over the last year
You can’t trust any of them, especially the right wing press, although I wouldn’t trust the Guardian either. The only reliable paper is the FT, because its needs to publish accuracy over sensationalism due to its reader base – policy makers, academics, business leaders and so on. But the FT is hardly the most enjoyable read if your looking for your daily fix of half truths, celebrity gossip, diet fads and fiction.
And the FT is also bloody expensive if you’re not part of its target market: business people for whom accurate information about the economy can make the difference between profit and loss!
I think a good a step forward would be forcing all printed media to publish corrections they’ve made in a prominent part of the paper, such as page 3, and they must be printed the following day the correction is made. For online versions a link to corrections should be clearly placed on the homepage. There should also be fines where deliberate attempts to mislead or deceive are clear and obvious, such as my ham sandwich example.
For to long these rags have hidden behind ‘press freedom’ as a shield for irresponsible journalism. I’m all for press freedom but I think its about time our papers started to show some integrity.
The UK trust in media is about 35%, and I’m concerned about what type of papers have this 35% trust. 35% ranks us 32nd in press trust globally. This isn’t good enough for a nation where integrity and fair play are supposed to defining characteristics.