The United Kingdom Struggles with Russian Language Deficiency in the Diplomatic Corps

The British Foreign Office was unprepared to deal with the tensions in Ukraine due to the lack of Russian speakers in their diplomatic corps. This was contained in the report provided by the Foreign Affairs Committee of the UK Parliament.

With this knowledge and the serious tensions currently happening in Ukraine, the Foreign Office is busy trying to recruit diplomats who are experts in the Russian language.

New asset needed

Speaking last week at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House, Philip Hammond, the British Foreign Secretary announced that the British government is now actively looking for intelligence officers and diplomats who are highly proficient in the Russian language.

It is presumed that the new recruits would be assigned the task of dissecting the speeches given by Russian government officials regarding foreign policy and military doctrine. They would be focusing on the pronouncements of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.

A tongue-in-cheek comment in the papers said that maybe the foreign affairs officials could emulate Gary Shteyngart, an American writer who was born in Russia. In an article printed in the New York Times, the writer said that in order for him to get a sense of the way Russians view the world, he watched nothing for a week but Russian TV programs run by the state.

While Russian is a beautiful language to learn, a newspaper article said that the reasons why skills in the Russian language are now back in vogue are deeply depressing. Some people are now compelled to learn it because as Mr. Hammond assessed, Russia still has the potential to be the greatest single threat to the security of their country.

Definite lack of foreign language expertise

There have been many reports on the lack of foreign language skills among Britons, especially in the British diplomatic service, and it seemed that the number of skilled Russian speakers have gone down considerably. According to the latest data, only about 27 percent of posts requiring a level of proficiency in the Russian language had been filled by staff who met the standards that were required.

Learning the Russian language

At the moment, Britain is focused in dealing with the potential threat in the military but there are more reasons to learn the Russian language, including the fact that it could improve relations between the two nations in the long run. Learning the language will expose diplomats to the rich Russian history and culture, which could be the key to understanding where the heart of the Russian public is placed today and tomorrow.

Russians love word plays and knowing the language could be beneficial in bringing insights into their culture.

Over in Russia, the younger generation is busy learning foreign languages, especially English. There had been a proposal from the Russian education minister to make it compulsory to add a foreign language in the schools, with a forward vision that a foreign language would be included in the core subjects in the unified state exam by the year 2020.

Image credit: Fleur Pellerin, the French Minister of Culture by Victor Korniyenko under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License..