Josh Allan
The decline and fall of the Roman Empire may have taken centuries, but the millennia-long decline of the Roman language is still ongoing. In 1959, at the peak of Latin education in the UK, when a Latin GCSE (then called an O Level), typically sat by 16-year-olds, was still compulsory for applicants to Oxford and Cambridge, nearly 50,000 students took the exam. By 1987, that number had dropped to 20,000; and in 2024, only around 5,000 students took the GCSE Latin examination. This precipitous and continuing decline, and the resultant paucity of young Classicists, was perhaps nowhere better embodied than by my A-level Latin class, where the teacher-to-student ratio was an extraordinary five-to-one.[1]
Compared with the previous century, the subject seems to have enjoyed a period of relative stability over the past fifteen years or so, but only because it survives in a cocoon of public school funding, where it is insulated from the usual criteria for determining what makes a language ‘useful’. When compared with the obvious utility of ‘living’ languages still spoken by hundreds of millions of people on a daily basis, Classicists often struggle to articulate why a language which has no native speakers beyond the Janiculum walls should continue to enjoy the privilege of being on the national curriculum at all.
Whether Latin is useful or not is besides the point, its defenders will claim. According to Mary Beard, the “one good reason for learning Latin… is that you want to read what is written in it.”And that is indeed a very good reason. The corpus of Latin literature includes much, if not most, of the Western Canon: the poetry of Virgil, Horace and Ovid; the letters of Newton, Descartes and Galileo; the philosophy of Boethius, Seneca and St Augustine. But Latinists should not be surprised when appeals to the cultural enrichment afforded by reading Livy’s Histories in their original form fail to persuade government ministers, such as UK Secretary of State for Education, Bridget Phillipson, who last week announced that the Latin Excellence Programme, which has enabled 5,000 state school students to study the language at GCSE level, has been axed.
Classics teachers often wrangle with the question of how to make Latin more interesting to students. But convincing students should, in practice, be a secondary concern compared with convincing government officials, for whom hard facts and statistical data are far likelier to cut through than nebulous rhetoric (however true) about the edifying effects of deciphering a dead language.
It is understandable why Classicists would prefer to run with the cultural argument for learning Latin, often couched as it is in the abstracted language of personal or even spiritual growth. Data is often considered a little dull by scholars who have eschewed the lucrative prospects offered by STEM subjects in favour of scrutinising ancient texts. For this reason, the cultural arguments often obscure the research evidence as to why learning Latin is a useful thing to do. But that research does exist and has done for some time.
Various papers, for example, attest to the linguistic advantages obtained by learning Latin. It has become something of a truism to point out that Latin ought to command a sense of matronly respect as the mother of all Romance languages, including French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, but it is a point worth expanding upon. If, as many assume, Latin is not itself ‘useful’, it does at least provide the tools to learn a number of ‘highly useful’ languages more efficiently. Consider that over three quarters of French and Spanish words derive directly from Latin, and that rana (“frog”), cena (“dinner”), luna (“moon”) and many other words in Italian’s quotidian terminology managed to make the long transition from Latin completely intact.
Of course, you could argue that learning Italian in isolation, or even Catalan or Romanian or Asturian, attunes learners to the Romance framework just as effectively, while supplying them with a language that can still be used conversationally with native speakers. But Latin, unlike its various offshoots, takes learners right back to the roots of the words we use. If you know the Sardinian word arvu, for instance, you may be able to deduce the meaning of árvore in Portuguese, but you’d be unlikely to understand Italian’s albero. Familiarity with arbor, the Latin ancestor of each of these words, makes it easy to grasp them intuitively at a glance, without having to resort to a dictionary.
And it’s not just Romance languages. As a study for Language Learning Journal has demonstrated, “the majority of findings support the claim that Latin helps with vocabulary, comprehension, and reading development of English L1 [i.e. up to age 11] pupils,” while research conducted by Durham University’s Arlene Holmes-Henderson has demonstrated a correlation between knowledge of Latin and English literacy skills. Around 29% of words in the English language come to us directly from Latin (and another 28% indirectly via French). Yet since Latin is not the basis of English, as it is for Romance languages proper, but rather an appendage that pads out the nomenclatural gaps in our Anglo-Saxon inheritance, most of these terms are typically encountered in technical or academic contexts. A knowledge of even basic Latin can therefore open the door to some of the more advanced and challenging regions of the English language. By knowing the definition of manus (“hand”), for example, you can easily figure out the meaning of “manuscript”, “manufacture”, “manicure”, “maniform”, “bimanous” – and so on.
The ability to comprehend entire pages of the dictionary instinctively won’t make you employable in and of itself, of course. But anyone considering becoming a doctor or a lawyer should be aware that the (highly remunerative) fields of medicine and law are replete with Latin terminology. Indeed, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges, “students who major or double-major in Classics have a better success rate getting into medical school than do students who concentrate solely in biology, microbiology, and other branches of science.”
Even non-European languages are simplified by the study of Latin. Aspects of the language such as the malleable word order, the high level of inflection (i.e. many different endings for individual words) or the absence of articles can help prepare learners for the challenges of studying languages such as Arabic, Russian or Mandarin. Acclimatising to a totally foreign syntax, not to mention Latin’s many declensions and conjugations, trains the mind to be more supple and elastic. A 1979 article by University of Chicago professor Nancy Mavrogenes and a 2004 article by Joyce VanTassel-Baska of the College of William and Mary both reached the same conclusion: the study of Latin, with its emphasis on memorisation and the cognitive gymnastics required to parse even basic sentences, had a beneficial effect on pupils’ intellectual abilities and test scores. Such skills can also aid progress in other formulative subjects, such as maths and the sciences: research has shown that students who study Latin are more likely to achieve higher scores on their Maths exams.
That such research needed conducting in the first place is testament to the fact that the real advantages of learning Latin are not always readily apparent. Yet neither are the advantages of studying Chemistry or Physics. Indeed, in these cases the many hours spent learning the laws of aerodynamics or the melting point of graphite are considered by educators to constitute a necessary trade-off, given that the groundwork covered in GCSE classes will prove essential to those few who do decide to take up a career in science.
But to think of Latin in the same way would be an error. J.S. Ubhi was right to ask, in a piece for Antigone last week, whether “we really want ‘usefulness’ for us as a state, as a culture, to be defined top-down by politicians or civil service bureaucrats?” For better or worse, however, it is precisely these arbiters of ‘usefulness’ who have unwittingly relegated the study of Latin to the lofty perch of independent school privilege. If only 3% of state schools offer Latin nowadays, it is because policy-makers such as Phillipson – who, as Tom Holland has pointed out, is now deliberately making it “difficult for state school students to study a language invaluable for the subjects she herself studied at Oxford”, namely French and History – struggle to translate the study of Latin into economic output.
Latin is useful, however; and unlike the sciences, it is not only useful to those who practise it. Indeed, Latin is useful to anyone who wishes to learn another language, or to anyone who hopes to become a doctor or a lawyer. It is useful to anyone who simply wants to improve their mental faculties, or expand the horizons of their perception, and that is without making the oft-repeated case – as I have avoided doing – that a knowledge of Latin deepens one’s understanding of Western culture, of art, philosophy and literature. If, as Phillipson maintains, students ought to “get a richer, broader, cutting-edge school experience”, the solution is to expand, rather than curtail, access to the world’s most influential language. We may not have the same use for Latin as the Romans did, but we can still make immense use of it nonetheless.
Josh Allan is a writer based in London. He received an MSt in World Literature from Mansfield College, Oxford, and his work has appeared in The Oxford Review of Books, Quillette, The Mallard and other publications.
To sign the petition to reverse the UK Government’s decision to cancel the Latin Excellence Program mid-year, leaving some 5,000 state-school pupils high and dry, please visit here.
Notes
| ⇧1 | Granted, two of them were stand-ins for two of the others, who were both put out of action by heart attacks; but this unfortunate circumstance speaks to the advanced age of the average Classics teacher. |
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