No one could pretend that learning Polish is easy. Those densely thatched rows of s and z sounds can prove a stumbling block even for native speakers, as in the famous tongue twister that starts W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie (“In the town of Szczebrzeszyn a beetle buzzes in the reeds”).
But there is a straightforward argument for why Britain should be polishing its polski in the future: the 2011 census confirmed that Polish is now the second most widely spoken language in England. Given the rich history of migration from Poland to the UK since the second world war, there are already thousands of young people eager to explore their heritage. With the influx of migration from eastern Europe since 2004, the demand for language teaching is likely to increase.
All the more absurd then that exam board AQA has announced it will scrap the Polish A-level (along with modern Hebrew, Bengali and Punjabi) from 2018, “in response to government reforms”. For the first time since 1950, students won’t be able to take their final school exam in the language. From overseas, Britain increasingly looks like an oddity: a multicultural monoglot. Reversing AQA’s decision could start to tackle that problem.
