Changing Horizons in Geography Education - HERODOT Network ...

Why geographers should be able to speak more than just EnglishThe HERODOT survey about the impacts of academic geography on the job mobilityof Geographers in 2003/2004 has shown that the job market for geographers isvery diversified. However in most occupations nowadays, apart from the necessarytechnical qualification a linguistic competence is also expected. The knowledge ofonly the English language is thereby mostly no longer sufficient for employment inEurope. Further language knowledge increases the chances of work. Beyond that,workforce mobility within Europe requires apart from knowledge of English furtherprofound language knowledge at least of the country in which the person would liketo work. However, improved chances on the job market cannot be the only reasonfor learning foreign languages. That would be too little.Let us therefore not just think of the “large” job market for geographers. We insteadshould consider arguments within the discipline. Geographers concern themselvesfor example with the question about the meaning of places: “Places are distinctiveand physical, economic and cultural processes create this distinctiveness.” (Owen &Ryan, 2003, 6−7) These cultural processes have to do also with a linguistic component.And if one considers that “[…] geographers view place as a concept that isexperienced by the individual rather than only defined by social and scientific processes”(Owen & Ryan, 2003, 7), one must come to the conclusion that it is necessaryto come to an approach where the individual will be able to reconstruct the meaningof places. And this only can happen by personal contact.Let me clarify this by two examples. The German weekly paper “Die ZEIT”visited in April and May 2005 four new member countries with – for us – newlanguages. The first presented country was Malta. “Malta is bilingual. English is usedby the Maltese only for business and for the tourists. Among themselves they speakMaltese.” (Straßmann, 2005) While searching for the identity of Malta the authoragain and again comes upon amazement, because he is interested in the Malteselanguage. Finally, within the discussion with a 75 year old Maltese, he comes to theconclusion that Maltese is the language of the heart. To come closer to the inhabitantsit is important to engage with the language.The other authors of this series of articles came to the same conclusion in Hungary,Slovenia and Poland. So those who expose themselves on holiday trips to the troubleof learning and using at least the most important “fragments of everyday life communication”,will state that the hearts of the people will open. Few will expect knowledgeof their language, therefore the effort makes everyone happy.The second example is based on an economic principle, which increasinglybecomes more important. For a company one or perhaps even the decisive function ofa foreign language is communication with the customer. In today’s service economythe customer strongly affects the behaviour of the service provider. Therefore it isespecially the case that smaller companies aim for close customer loyalty; and thatmeans that the best language is the language of the customer (c.f. Nida-Rümelin,1996). The results of a Belgian study on the importance of languages in businessshow that 63% of the Belgian enterprises use the German language when workingwith German enterprises, and not English (Boulton & Vlieghe, 2001). This trend to256