Languages now: from crisis to transformation?

The article addresses the multiple challenges faced by the language disciplines across the educational pipeline in the UK, with a particular focus on Higher Education (HE). It explores the reasons, both global and local, for the current situation, and sets out the contexts—relating to policy and social realities such as multilingualism—in which a ‘new public idea about language’ is to be forged. There is a focus on the decline in numbers of language learners in schools, impediments to student mobility, the contraction in lesser-taught languages and the social justice issues that result from the emergence of cold spots in HE provision. The article concludes with a discussion of a number of measures, cross-sectoral and cross-disciplinary, that have been adopted to enhance public understanding of languages, promote linguistically sensitive policymaking and encourage the establishment of a national languages strategy. This article is published in the thematic collection ‘On recent closures and threats of closure in the Humanities and Social Sciences’, edited by Regenia Gagnier.