JEP 3 July 2026

The Competitive Cost of Linguistic Blindness

This article was published by the Jersey Evening Post on 3 July 2026.

Half of Jersey's workforce was not born here. That means in the workplace, every other person around us came from somewhere other than here. Our society comprises people who speak more than 84 languages, but we are treating this wealth as a problem to manage rather than a resource for growth.

The scale of the opportunity is worth pausing to take in. In 2011, one fifth of the population described themselves as something other than “Jersey” or “British”. Ten years later, that figure had risen to one quarter. And in the five years to 2024, the number of people with “rest-of-world” nationality grew by 172%.

This demographic shift has brought us rich new linguistic resources, the value of which we are yet to properly recognise. Though the Island actually has three official languages (English, French, and Jèrriais), almost all of our workplace interactions are in English, which is not the mother tongue for more than a quarter of us.

When we expect every fourth person to work exclusively in English, we are forcing them to use a foreign operating system. They are present. They are working. But we are not providing the conditions for their fullest contribution, because we have excluded the language they work best in. Which means that the business is paying full salary for only part of what the person has to offer.

The native speakers are equally hampered by an English-only environment. In an age where AI tools and free translation can handle the exchange of information between speakers of different languages, monolingual thinking is a strategic liability. The competitive advantage now belongs to people who have the cognitive capacity to move between worlds, not just technological capacity to move between words.

So the question for Jersey businesses is not "can we all speak English?" It is rather: "Are we creating an environment where everyone can make their best contribution? And are we developing the collaborative and creative thinking skills that we need to compete on a global stage?"

The solution is not to keep trying to push ourselves (or our staff or our children) to learn a foreign language. We have been losing that argument for decades, and AI translation seems to have put the final nail in the coffin. So severe has the drop-off been from formal language study in the UK that even the University of Nottingham (home to one of the largest modern language units in the country) announced in November 2025 that it was suspending all of its modern foreign language programmes, with a view to closing them permanently.

What we need to do instead is rethink the role of language itself. If we see language solely as a means of communication, then linguistic diversity throws up barriers. If, however, we recognise language as a means of thought, then linguistic diversity becomes a highly valuable asset.

In his book An Immense World, Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Ed Yong writes: “Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields … But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world.”

We select which parts of that tiny sliver we will pay attention to. We interpret the data in those parts to make sense of it, and from that we construct an impression of reality. That impression triggers certain thoughts and feelings in us, on the basis of which we take action. Since we use language to do all of this, the entire process is shaped by the language (or languages) that we use.

On a flight back out of Kuala Lumpur, I had nothing to read but the safety instructions in front of me, which were written in English and Malay. I got to wondering which of the Malay words meant “seat” and, with the help of an online translator, discovered that my life jacket was under “the place where I sat down.” I was used to thinking about a seat as an object (which might be large or small, clean or dirty, plain or luxurious etc), but Malay shifted my focus from an external inanimate object to what I was doing.

Or consider an experiment conducted by psychologist Toshi Konishi. They showed the same picture of a bridge to a group of Spanish speakers and a group of German speakers. The word for “bridge” in Spanish is grammatically masculine, whilst in German it is grammatically feminine. Konishi observed that the Spanish group used more “masculine” descriptors for the bridge while the German group used more “feminine.” The same data, but different language lenses tended to draw the viewer’s attention to different aspects of it.

In a similar vein, in a post on Instagram, the Language Nerds pointed out that while in English money is something you “earn,” other languages present it as something that you “make” or “win” or “reap” or “do” or “gain” or “find” or “pull out.” How might looking at money through each of those different lenses shift the way we think about income generation?

Notice that we have not learned to say anything in any of these other languages here, but they have caused us to think differently about seats, bridges and money. None of us can see things from every possible perspective individually, but the more perspectives we can see things from collectively, the smarter we become as a team. The various languages we have in our organisations are potential gateways to alternative perspectives on everything from market analysis to product design, from risk reviews to infrastructure development, from investment to innovation — if we are willing to see those languages as part of our corporate capability rather than a private biographical detail.

As an Island, we already speak more than 84 different languages. That is not a problem to manage; it is a resource for Jersey’s growth. And leveraging that resource does not require any of us to learn to speak a new language: we simply need to stop assuming that English is the only way to think and start making space for the other quarter of the population’s perspectives.

Sources

Jersey’s Population (February 2026) from Policy Centre Jersey (www.policy.je)
Report on the 2021 Census from Statistics Jersey (stats.je)
Report on Population and Migration: Nationality and Work Permits (Dec 2024) from Statistics Jersey (stats.je)
Language Policy for Jersey Education review (April 2023) from Jersey Education ( www.gov.je/Education)
Supporting Multilingual Learners in School and at Home (https://www.gov.je/Education/Schools/ChildLearning/pages/multilinguallearners.aspx)
Comments on Delivery Of Three Bilingual Primary Schools (presented to the States September 2024)
Yong, E. (2022). An immense world: How animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us [Kindle edition]. Random House.

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