Un strålande futuro needs mehr dan два langues—A bright future needs more than two languages¹

To start this commentary, it might be good to position myself briefly: I am a European-born multilingual senior academic with a Dutch–German–Swiss heritage and identity, who is currently based in the Netherlands. Over the years, I have lived in five different European countries, each with a different majority language, and I have plenty of experience with how to live and work in another European language and culture. My academic and private lives require me to use at least four languages on a daily base, which I consider one of the most rewarding privileges. At my institution, I act among others as an educator for future teachers of modern foreign languages (MFL). In addition, I am the chair of the Language Learning group, and as such I am the line manager of a team of 30 language teachers covering eight different languages that are taught within the Bachelor program of European Languages and Cultures, within the Faculty of Arts at the University of Groningen. Unsurprisingly, I am an advocate of learning and teaching languages. I dedicate my scholarly work as a teacher of and researcher to the learning of German and Dutch as a second language (L2) in particular, and of all languages in general—including languages other than English (LOTEs). In this setting, reading the anchor piece, “The canary in coal country: Educational policy, politics, and the dissolution of a language program” (Thompson et al., 2025, this issue), has evoked both an experience of eye-opening and strong feeling of recognition. In terms of opening my eyes, some of the presented political and educational connections in the United States were entirely new to me. Part of the described complexities seem to be locally grounded in the specifics of the United States, a country where English is the majority language, where a strong federal political system is in competition with national governance, and where the obvious need to learn a foreign language might be one of the lowest in the world, given the propagated monolingual context. In contrast, my two homes (The Netherlands and Switzerland) are small countries of just over 16,000 square miles. The majority of citizens in both countries are multilingual as they speak at least one of the official national languages (including Dutch, Frisian, and Dutch Sign Language in the Netherlands; German, French, Italian, and Romansh in Switzerland), next to local dialects (e.g., Gronings, Brabants in the Netherlands; one out of more than 20 German–Alemannic varieties in Switzerland), and/or a home language (from historical immigrant languages such as Italian, Papiamento, Turkish, and Arabic, to newer “expat” languages such as Swedish or Polish). These small nations are surrounded by larger and sociopolitically, culturally, and economically central nations such as France and Germany, and have strong trade connections across Europe and the world. Therefore, despite their size, they are global players in industries such as agriculture and financing and are known drivers of (technological) innovation. Dutch and Swiss citizens have a long history of learning MFLs. More importantly, given that a 2-hour train ride often already requires the use of another language, many people living in the Netherlands or Switzerland have become used to putting their MFL knowledge into practice. Consequently, in both countries, MFL education has a long tradition, with children starting MFL classes in primary school (e.g., as content and language integrated learning [CLIL]/bilingual schooling) and compulsory education providing substantial time to teach not just one but often three MFLs (typically, French, German, English; nowadays also Spanish and/or Chinese; and in Switzerland, Italian, given that it is a language of the country). The school systems in the Netherlands and Switzerland, however, differ, at least in their governance. In Switzerland, like the United States, education falls under federal laws, with 26 local “state policies” (Costache et al., 2022). In the Netherlands, education is governed at the national level—be it that parents have the constitutional right to choose the school of their children, a choice that is often based on an ideological or religious denomination (cf. Michel et al., 2021). Nevertheless, even in these contexts distinct from the United States, contexts where LOTE learning seems to be a natural choice, it is easy to recognize parallels with regard to MFL education and current (political) trends highlighted in Thompson et al.’s (2025, this issue) piece. Also in the Netherlands and Switzerland, it is increasingly being questioned whether there is a need to learn and teach LOTEs. Like in the United States, the motivation to pick up language studies beyond compulsory school education and beyond the unquestioned learning and use of English has been on a steady decline (Costache et al., 2022; Michel et al., 2021). The introduction of large language models (e.g., ChatGPT) for the wider public and technological advancements in automatic translation and speech recognition makes people wonder why language learning is needed at all: Everyone speaks English, so learning other languages is a waste of time. Limited experiences of success based on high-school language education add to this feeling of uselessness. This holds true even for German in the Netherlands, where Germany is the most important trade partner as well as a popular holiday destination, where the linguistic proximity between the mother tongue Dutch and its close neighbor language German would allow for fairly easy acquisition, and where students choosing to study German are univocally positive about their language studies (Abitzsch et al., 2024). In the Netherlands, students finishing pre-academic high schools typically have had 5–6 years of compulsory German education, adding up to approximately 500 hours of instruction ideally, and bringing them to an upper-intermediate B2 level (Michel et al., 2021). This is the ideal. In practice, we see that for many years, the national school leaving exams have focused on reading comprehension and created negative washback. Too often, final high school years have been turned into exam training, making high-school language education a subject that students tend to find boring. Furthermore, we notice that students entering our programs at university are not always accustomed to using the language as a communicative tool, as high-school education is regularly focused on grammatical rules, vocabulary training, and reading comprehension, favoring receptive rather than productive skills. Consequently, the numbers for university student enrollments into any language program are disappointing but probably most so for German: From 20,000 Dutch high-school students taking the final exam in German annually, not even 100 choose to study the language at university—at least not as their major. A soothing trend might be that students are taking up broader Bachelor of Arts programs that have a compulsory minor in language studies (e.g., International Relations), making the total number of students enrolling in language classes less alarming. Still, for many years, there has been a visible decline. In light of what I described before about the Netherlands being a small country surrounded by countries using other languages, it remains puzzling why language studies, especially German, are not popular. Following a neoliberal call for “usefulness,” it should be an attractive choice for young people aiming for job security. Hence, companies and the public sector (including teacher education) are desperately looking for people who are fluent speakers of German. Private sector language schools that offer German for professionals who did not pursue learning this language successfully are thriving.Yet businesses and public institutions looking for someone who has a good command of Dutch and German might soon be able to turn to Germany, as the number of German students learning Dutch seems to be more stable. Thus, finding a person who knows both languages, more often than not, will be a German with a good command of Dutch, rather than the other way around, as it used to be the case. To better understand student choices, Abitzsch et al. (2024) launched a survey among pupils and students across the Netherlands to find out why they choose or do not choose to continue with German once compulsory education has finished. The data demonstrate that students show plenty of interest in German-speaking countries, people, and culture and many also discover their love for the German language, which they experience as challenging as a system but also easy, given the close proximity of Dutch and German. So, why does it seem to be a step too far to embark on a study of German as a major or minor? Abitzsch et al.’s (2024) survey results and follow-up interviews give some interesting insights. Apparently, quite often young people with an interest in languages are discouraged from taking up language studies by their parents, friends, and even their language teachers. This discouragement stems from myths about language learning and the idea that becoming a teacher is the only professional outcome. The fact that the latter is not seen as a job that is respected in the Netherlands does not help either. As an illustration, one of our respondents revealed, “Ik studeerde rechten en Duits. Toen ik Duits koos, zeiden mijn ouders: ‘Daar heb je toch geen baankansen mee’ en ‘Dan word je docent!’ʼʼ (…) Alsof dat de hel is! [I studied law and German. When I chose German, my parents said, ‘You won't have any job opportunities with that anyway’ and ‘Then you will become a teacher!’ (…) As if that's hell!]” (Abitzsch et al., 2024, p. 21, own translation from Dutch). This quote shows that a generally negative attitude toward language studies exists—in particular, LOTEs—because they seemingly do not allow for any other future than becoming a language teacher, which also suffers from a negative image. As a society, it is imperative, therefore, to respond more positively to young people with an interest in language—especially if someone expresses a desire to become a language teacher. As we speak, there are ongoing campaigns by (semi-)governmental structures that aim to attract students into teacher education and into language studies alike, in particular, for French and German, both being compulsory subjects in Dutch schools facing large teacher shortages. For example, a unique cooperation of all 15 university programs offering German in the Netherlands targets, more specifically, current language teachers. Under the slogan “Give us a student”2 we remind teachers of their role as ambassadors for their own subjects and ask them to send us at least one student per year. If each teacher who is providing classes in the final year of high school would motivate one student to pick up German studies, there would be roughly a thousand starters annually. Such a shared responsibility and shared action would be able to start a trend. To support teachers and students to convince their surroundings (e.g., parents) that choosing a language is something positive, we have also created a poster teachers can put up in their classrooms or share as a flyer with interested pupils, highlighting 10 reasons to go for languages.3 Each statement (e.g., “language skills allow for personal contact,” “language studies are brain gymnastics,” “language skills are needed for the development of AI”) is accompanied by a popular science article detailing research-based evidence in support of the assertion. encountering ideas and realities beyond one's own limited experience allows one to engage with the world beyond one's head, ideally as a co-conspirator rather than competitor or aggressor: Language learning exponentially expands the scope of experience and, potentially, the scope of understanding as well. Yet, as mentioned, also in the Netherlands and Switzerland, there is a broader tendency that is closely tied to what Thompson et al. (2025, this issue) bring forward: The recognized value of language studies is under pressure. This devaluation is felt among young students in compulsory secondary education as well as in tertiary education. Declining motivation for choosing to study a language looks similar in the two countries, and it seems to reflect a broader societal issue that has its origin at least partially in political choices of the past decades. In the Netherlands, several reforms in secondary education have reduced the time available for MFL learning and teaching (Michel et al., 2021). This reduction has resulted in students reaching lower levels of proficiency, which in turn affects student motivation. Lower language skills lead to worse experiences in terms of self-efficacy and confidence, which negatively influences uptake and motivation. Unfortunately, the felt deficits in efficacy and confidence have also translated into fewer students choosing the career of a language teacher, which means that a vicious cycle has already evolved. At the moment of writing, this is exactly what we see happening: Educating fewer students to become a MFL teacher means that there is a shortage of teachers. In the city of Groningen, with roughly 240,000 inhabitants, we hear that schools (have to) decide to suspend the teaching of German because they cannot find someone to teach these classes. The educational policy allows the school to discontinue the teaching of that MFL. Yet, if fewer students learn the language in high school, they are less likely to choose to study languages at university. There is one big exception (for how long?) to this decline in interest in MFL, which is teaching and learning English. In particular, urban centers like Amsterdam and Zürich have seen a growing number of international inhabitants who do not speak the local language and make no or hardly any attempts to learn it. Instead, English is used as an international language for daily communication. For the Netherlands, the omnipresence of English has sparked the question of whether this language can still be considered a “foreign” language or whether it rather be seen as a second language of the country (Edwards, 2016), given that public spaces and the media often use English and young people seem to use English as flexibly and naturally as their mother tongue, Dutch. The feeling is that because English is everywhere, and everyone speaks and uses it, LOTEs become unneeded. The fallacy of this reasoning lies in the underlying utilitarian and neoliberal perspective that everything needs to be “useful,” and that this usefulness is measured in terms of economic benefits, as argued by Thompson et al. (2025, this issue). Yet, following the idea of capacity building and humanization, language learning is much more than that. Language studies are an excellent intellectual challenge. Thinking about language as a cognitive system and a social phenomenon is not only challenging and formative but also great fun. It would be desirable for young people to experience language studies in school, and MFL education is an excellent locus for such training. Looking at other languages and cultures can transform our way of thinking. For example, even though we all have a word for “bread,” cultures attach very different concepts to it. In Europe, Germans in particular are known for their narrow concept of bread. It seems to be part of their identity, and the Dutch or English versions of “bread” are inadequate. Indeed, language is closely related to culturally specific concepts. Already a century ago, the German poet Mascha Kaléko, who emigrated to the United States, expressed her frustration with English by stating that “Begriffe fehlen, nicht nur Worte (…) weil ja die Mentalität jeder Nation sich im Fehlen oder Vorhandensein bestimmter Begriffe in ihrem Sprachschatz kundtut. [Concepts, not just words are missing (…) because the mentality of every nation is expressed in the existence or lack of concepts in their language]” (2012, p. 833, own translation from German). Especially on topics that are more important to our identity than bread—think of concepts like democracy, freedom, education (or shall we say, Bildung)—becoming aware of the perspectives of other people, who speak and use another language and have been formed in another culture, seems to be crucial for modern societies. Yet, too often, our current education systems fall sadly short in this regard—or they are at risk of soon starting to fall short, once MFLs are eliminated from programs. The formation of conscious citizens, in line with the Humboldt and European ideal, does build on foreign language skills: ideally, the mother tongue plus two (not just one) other languages (European Parliament, 2023), to develop the potential of the many perspectives that make up a life with more than two languages. Teaching MFLs is ideally suited to thinking about language as a system and as an expression of identity. Language is such a crucial part of our human being, and becoming aware of how you make meaning in different languages reveals different perspectives. Accordingly, by learning a language, we learn to understand that “different” is not “strange” or “crazy” but rather fascinating. How fantastic is it, for example, that in German, you can tell from the suffix on the article whether the noun is the subject (“der Hund [thesubject dog]”) or direct object (“den Hund [theobject dog]”) of the sentence? In other, less morphologically rich languages such as English, you need to adhere to strict word order, while inflecting languages have morphological markers. These are important experiences to make for the formation of human beings. Moreover, neurocognitive, psycholinguistic, and sociolinguistic research into multilingualism shows again and again that humans are perfectly capable of learning, living, and processing several languages in parallel. Our brains are wondrous machines that do not have to choose. Therefore, it is unnecessary and awkward to be selective and restrict ourselves. The European ideal is to celebrate the beauty of different perspectives, which helps us to understand our own position by shaping and sharpening our views. By immersing oneself in another language and culture, people not only learn how to grasp the complexity of the other language but they can also use the beauty of language and culture to reflect on their own background. MFL programs, particularly those of LOTEs, are pursuing exactly that goal: broadening perspectives by training young people in cross-border and The should be not only that language learn how to ask for the at the have a of German by that language education to language in to linguistic and 2022). As long as the of a of language learning can offer everyone the to discover and develop new and see the world different eyes, them to personal This is an experience should aim to give to all our students and that educational in many of the world to In the the role of education is not to that to a (Thompson et al., 2025, this issue). we should aim at human to become that cannot be particularly in our current