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Why Latin should not be removed from schools

2023-07-30 08:54:00, Blog CNA

Knowing foreign languages ??is increasingly important in the age of globalization. While many people want to learn French and Spanish, given their importance in today's society, high school students still have the opportunity to learn Latin, although it is often considered a "dead" language due to the lack of native speakers. We don't even know what she sounded like because she died long before her sounds were recorded.

In Germany, interest in Latin has declined across the country. While in 2008 more than 830,000 young Germans were still learning the Indo-European language at school, in 2021/2022 there were only 539,000. Compared to Latin, French is almost three times more popular.

Professor Stefan Freund is president of the German Association of Classical Philologists (DAV), the professional association for Latin and Greek in schools and universities, and teaches Latin at the University of Wuppertal.

Deutsche Welle spoke to the professor about Latin and its future in German education.

DW: Is Latin a "dead" language?

SF: Latin is a vivid look at the past and how language works.

What are the arguments in favor of learning Latin today?

Learning Latin provides meta-skills that can be applied throughout life to approach and learn other foreign languages, and which, in essence, do not become obsolete. While learning modern foreign languages ??focuses on communication, learning Latin focuses on linguistic reflection, especially on differences with German, on the functioning of a sentence, on the evolution of words, and on the formulation of certain statements in certain situations.

Why Latin should not be removed from schools

Professor Stefan Freund

And, of course, Latin is the common mother of the Romance language family (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian) and the origin of many English words, for example language, computer and artificial intelligence.

Do students choose Latin over French or Spanish, for example, at the insistence of their parents or because they already have a particular field of study in mind?

One can only speculate about the students' motivations. Four points are likely to be important: A general interest in history and mythology and an approach to language more through reflection and analysis than through direct communication. In addition, a study or career prospect for which Latin seems useful and the teachers, who are on average quite young, know how critically the public, parents and students regard their subject and therefore the they attach great importance to it being attractive, which has nothing to do with clichéd images.

For which fields of study and which professions is Latin useful, even essential, in Germany?

The requirements for Latin are different. Demand for Latin as a trend seems rarer than before. In any case, Latin is useful for many subjects: history, philosophy, theology, Roman studies, legal studies (Roman law), medicine (history of medicine, terminology), pharmacy (terminology), linguistics, all disciplines that deal with periods before 1750 and with the European area... History of music, history of art, history of science, history of the church, local history.

Latin died out around the 7th or 8th century, but when did it decline in importance?

Until the 18th century, Latin was the language most used for printing newly published books. My knowledge of Latin enables me to access vast amounts of knowledge on all kinds of subjects, because only a small part of this Neo-Latin text has been translated./ DW