Welcome to our first issue of the Language Exepress!

One of the things I enjoy doing as Head of Modern Languages is giving talks at open days to prospective undergraduates and their parents. When I give these talks I face the challenge of trying to articulate what it means to study what we call ‘Modern Languages’. It’s a tall order. I’m always very keen to get across the message that studying in our department is about much more than just verbs and vocab. It is about those things, of course, and we have a brilliant and highly dedicated team of language-teaching staff who provide expert guidance and tuition. Good grammar and a wide-ranging vocabulary will get you far, but they are by no means the only dish on the menu. Studying Modern Languages is a feast, a copious banquet rather than an exclusion diet.

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It is about curiosity, openness to difference and otherness; it’s about communication, understanding and enquiry; it’s about opening doors, expanding horizons and about finding a way from A to B via deductions, critical judgements and (sometimes) educated guesses. Study Modern Languages and unavoidably you will have to grapple with grammar; but for much of your time you have the freedom to pursue whatever makes you tick, be it history, film, politics, linguistics, literature or visual culture. And sometimes several of these in combination. The lecturers and professors who teach the culture modules on offer in our undergraduate and MA programmes are specialists in a remarkable range of fields. From the history and cultural currency of Spanish film; criminal justice in seventeenth-century France; Sino-Middle Eastern relations; cognitive linguistics and language contact; to exhibitions of Nazi history and the translation of contemporary writing by women. And the list goes on. In French you might call this un embarras de richesses, though I’m very proud, rather than embarrassed, at the breadth of what we offer at Exeter. Italians might see an imbarazzo della scelta—an embarrassment not of riches but of choice—whereas in Spanish, it would be a sobreabundancia, which again brings to mind groaning tables and full bellies. Whatever your language(s), Modern Languages as a degree pathway is about plurality, multiplicity and choice. It trains you as critical thinkers, close readers, articulate speakers and astute evaluators and assimilators of information.

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The Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously stated that ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of my world’, which is a proposition that offers a range of possible interpretations. It comes back to me with some regularity and unfailingly makes me glad that I followed languages as a career: the learning process never really stops, and with it, my world keeps expanding. I’ve been fortunate enough to talk about the research I do in locations including Amsterdam and Beijing, London and Louisiana, Paris and Milan. Learn a language, immerse yourself in its structures, the culture it conveys, the artists it inspires and who, in turn, breathe life into it for others, and you give yourself a chance better to understand the world and your place in it.