Money talks or How much is a language worth?

University students about to graduate into an undeniably bleak jobs market become nervous when they hear that pushy New York parents have been hiring Chinese nannies to give their offspring a head start in Mandarin. Meanwhile, final year students with Japanese or Arabic are being snapped up by the best firms.
So does it really pay to learn a foreign language? Unless you are a talented linguist or were brought up in a multilingual household, learning a language takes time, commitment and often a lot of money for lessons. In an age where the economic value of everything is measured, is it worth it?
For non-English speakers, the answer is obvious. English is no longer a foreign language but a basic skill in a globalised world, you won’t get that job if you don’t have it. But English speakers have felt they had an advantage because they already speak the global language, English.
James Foreman Peck at Cardiff University’s Business School says it is more efficient for a smaller group to acquire the language of a much larger group. As long as the two groups are communicating in a common language, economic benefits will accrue to both. So it makes sense for the Welsh to learn English rather than for the English to learn Welsh.
Foreman Peck also says that the cost to a member of a rich nation of learning, say, Mandarin or Arabic is much higher than for a Chinese or Middle-Eastern person learning English (leaving aside intrinsic difficulty). So economically speaking, if the rest of the world learns English, English speakers should not need other languages to improve communication, which is what the English have relied on all along.
The problem arises when you go to China and they converse with each other in Mandarin, leaving you out.
David Graddol author of the influential book “The Future of English” argued that a country’s trading status was an indication of the importance of its language for non-native speakers. If you want to trade with them, you need to learn their language. They do not need to learn yours.
That pushes Japanese, German and French above Mandarin in global foreign language rankings. Using that analysis, Russian, declining since the late 1980s, may even make a comeback as energy trade rises and if in the near future Russia joins the World Trade Organisation and reduces trade barriers.
But now there is another reason to learn a language, and it has nothing to do with what is good for the economy and everything to do with personal finances – Employers like languages, whether they need them for their businesses or not. Many larger companies say fluency in another language is often the “tie-breaker” when they are deciding between two equally good candidates. University careers departments even suspect employers of using language fluency as a filter to narrow down a large field of applicants.
In an era when employers looked for evidence of extra-curricular interests, it was easy to spend your free time on the squash courts or cricket pitch. Nowadays employers are sniffy about sports unless you sailed around the world single-handed at 13. So there is every reason to switch to the language lab as the return on learning tongues rises.
Starting salaries for graduates in science and technology subjects has always been higher than arts and humanities. But the monetary return on language degrees is increasing. According to the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), graduates with a degree in German have a starting salary slightly higher than chemistry graduates but lower than business studies and politics graduates. Next comes graduates with a degree in French, who earn less than those with chemistry but more than those with history or law (remember we are talking of starting salaries here) while graduates with Spanish and Portugese earn less than history, law and geography graduates, but more than sociology and English graduates. The numbers with degrees in Mandarin and Arabic are still too small to make similar comparisons.
Overall, though, the difference between the languages is not that big in salary terms. So it’s hardly worth learning German if you hate German, in the hope of earning more than if you’d plumped for French.
In fact, your overall level of education and chosen profession is a better predictor of salary than the language you choose. It is the same in the US. A 2007 analysis of American graduates, with controls for cognitive ability, suggests a 2-3 per cent wage premium for college graduates who speak a second language. But this compares
poorly to the return on an extra year of education of 8-14%.
That may be a relief as you try to avoid Mandarin lessons. But another problem is emerging - jobs that actually require languages, want two. Spanish AND Portuguese, Japanese AND Korean. The Confederation of British Industries said last year the demand was not just for Mandarin. But Mandarin and Cantonese.
The good news is that two related languages are obviously easier to learn than languages that are unrelated. But if you are time poor, it may matter which two.
The US state department has calculated that it takes three times more lessons for its diplomats to become proficient in Mandarin compared to French or Spanish. Put another way, you could learn three European languages in the same time it takes to learn Mandarin. The return in terms of jobs and income on being proficient in three more common European languages may well be higher than the return on an exotic one.
And some people ask if Mandarin (or Japanese or Arabic) isn’t a bit of a fad that will fade eventually, so why put so much time, money and effort into it?
Predicting which languages will rise or fall has become something of a parlour game. Asking whether Mandarin is more important than German is like asking the difference between Smarties or Kit-Kat - it depends on your taste and inclination. Meanwhile there are many, many other unmeasurable factors, such as the pleasure of learning a particular language, interest in a culture, visiting a certain country for holidays and the fun of communicating across borders generally that can’t be quantified.
Whichever way you look at it, though, heading off to the language lab a couple of times a week has got to be more profitable than sitting back wondering whether a language is worth it.