DROVES OF 14-year-olds are abandoning the study of modern languages. Copies of Encore Tricolore are festering sous la table, and big sweaty earphones hang redundant on the wall of the listening lab. This is unsurprising. When something slightly boring becomes optional, teenagers will tend to jump ship. And who can blame them, when the sexier shores of GCSE Drama and Media Studies beckon?

At my school, the Media Studies crowd thought themselves achingly hip; purple eyeliner so thick they could barely see the drum’n’ bass video they were editing. And I can well understand the louche appeal of GCSE Drama; an easy A* for devising issue-led play- lets about emergency contraception and interpreting the poetry of e. e. cummings through movement. Why would anyone drudge through verb tables when they can get the same grade for dabbling in mime? Why endure the German listening tape about the 1989 Bavarian Power Cut, when you could be praised to the skies for your analysis of the new KFC advert?

I can see the deserters’ point. But, at the risk of sounding like a slightly square older cousin, I would beg them to think twice before they succumb to the bodystocking and the mixing desk. Not because, as dour grown-ups so boringly assert, having a language will one day render them invaluable to the future of British industry and commerce. But because they will soon be 18, and may well take a gap year. Perhaps they’ll want to travel. And when they do, they’ll be in for a nasty shock. Lost teenage backpackers are already a despised breed. They take up too much space on buses, spill Fanta in the Louvre, and clog up the hostel phone with three-hour calls to their parents back in Guildford. And if they don’t speak a single word of the language, then so much the worse.

I know; I spent a month travelling through countries whose mother tongue I had dropped at 14 in favour of Food Technology. Nothing riles a Spanish waiter more than being handed a mobile phone so your mother can order you your ham sandwich. And just you try buying a Deutsche Bahn ticket with the rags of German you picked up from The Sound of Music.

No, go back to your languages teacher, guys. He’s waiting for you. All alone, trying sadly to turn an umlaut into a smiley face. You won’t regret it.