There is something profoundly short-sighted about closing language departments, reducing opportunities to study languages, or making it harder for students to spend a year abroad. When we remove la…

When I was choosing my GCSE options many years ago, I don’t remember thinking that languages would shape the rest of my life. I enjoyed them, certainly, but I had no grand plan involving travelling…

The Romanian community in the UK is now a million strong, yet while pupils can sit GCSEs in everything from Urdu to Portuguese and Biblical Hebrew, this vast cohort remains overlooked, with no formal ...

When I discovered Romani heritage in my family tree, naturally I had to learn the language. What I didn’t realise then was how rich, expressive and complex the Romani language was. Not only that, b…

Learning a new language is always an exciting adventure, but when it comes to the Basque language, the journey becomes even more intriguing. Basque, or Euskara as it is called in the language itsel…

There are occasions when a message appears on my phone that makes me stop for a moment and look up from whatever I’m doing. It might arrive on a busy weekday afternoon between meetings, or late in …

When I think back on my degree, it isn’t the lectures or essays that stand out most clearly. It’s the year I spent living somewhere new – a year that took the language I’d studied in classroo…

Romanian is the most widely spoken foreign first language in London with 159,000 speakers.