ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the history of language learning choices made by English speakers that have led to today's status quo. It aims is to examine, and help explain, such changes in priorities, and so to consider how they might change again in future. The chapter is roughly chronological, treating languages in the approximate order that they gained a foothold as foreign languages in Britain. The very existence of an acronym LOFT (languages other than French) in the 1990s to cover German, Italian, Russian and Spanish, confirms that every other foreign language is defined in relation to this first foreign language. When the new School Certificate was introduced in 1918, Italian and Russian were the two languages added to French, German and Spanish. Before foreign languages became a formal part of modern language education in the nineteenth century, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, German and Russian had all come into the orbit of at least some language learners in Britain.
