Sources differ somewhat in the identification of the ten most-widely spoken languages in the world.  Definitional issues are important.  Should Hindi and Urdu be regarded as the same language?  Should we use figures for first-language speakers, or should we include those who speak a particular tongue as a second or third language?  The list below comes from a reasonably reliable web site (http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/most_spoken_languages.htm) but holds data that go back to 1999.  Nevertheless it will do for the purposes of my argument.  The top ten list on that site is as follows:
1. Mandarin Chinese and mutually comprehensible variants
2. Hindi
3. Spanish
4. English
5. Arabic
6. Bengali / Bangla
7. Portuguese
8. Russian
9. Japanese
10. German

I've recently challenged a number of people around the university to say how many languages we teach at Sheffield. None has yet got it r ight - most under-estimate by around 30%.  My count (including one or two that are offered as intensive courses) comes to 19 at the present time.  It includes every language in that top ten group with the two exceptions of Hindi and Bengali.  In this respect we are one of the very few universities in the UK that can truly claim to offer a near-comprehensive set of languages to our students. Yet this fact is one of the least known of our strengths.

(I suspect that some will be surprised at the absence of French from the list above - and at the fourth place held by English.  Both are important lingua franca, but have fewer native speakers - many fewer in the case of French - than the other languages above them in the table.)

As part of our proposal to students coming under the new fee regime in 2012 we want to offer them the chance to develop the skills needed to enter the global labour market.  Our employers on the Careers Advisory Board have coined the phrase 'cultural agility', by which they mean the flexibility of approach, attitude and cultural understanding to do business and work with people from very different global circumstances. One important way of developing those attributes is through learning a language. Our employers tell us that it doesn't really matter what language it is. But they want to know that a student is capable of developing at least a 'get by' knowledge of a different tongue, and that they have understood the ways in which people in different cultures may act and behave differently in common situations.

We need to have our future 'offer' of languages fully worked through by the middle of June so that when applicants for 2012 entry first come on campus, as they will do at the first open day, on June 18th, we have something exciting, comprehensive and important to tell them about. Today I have been briefing a colleague on the challenges of delivering that vision in the course of the next two months, and then of turning it into reality.  This is something I believe passionately in.  Ideally I would like all our Sheffield graduates to have some level of competence in a language other than their native tongue - but I am enough of a realist to recognise that I would find it very difficult to win a university-wide battle on that.  But I do want to raise the proportions of our students who engage with a foreign language at some point in their time with us - and who we then support in making their claim for competence to work wherever in the world there are jobs and opportunities.  And, to add a little idealism to this, being able to break the ice in a conversation with someone from another country is halfway to making them a friend and colleague rather than an enemey to be looked at with suspicion.  So if Sheffield really pursues its strnegths in languages I believe we will be doing our bit for global peace and understanding as well.