Should Our Children Still Learn Languages?
If an earpiece can translate everything, parents and schools must decide what language learning is really for.
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Within a few years, a child with a phone or a pair of earbuds may be able to hold a conversation in almost any language without learning a word of it. DeepL already offers live spoken translation in more than forty languages, including inside video calls. For parents paying for extra Afrikaans lessons, or schools deciding how many periods to give isiXhosa, the question is obvious and uncomfortable. If the machine can translate, why should our children still learn languages?
CONTEXT AND BACKGROUND
The timing is awkward for South Africa. While global technology races ahead on translation, our schools are still working out how to teach children in the language they think in. The Department of Basic Education says fewer than a quarter of South Africans, mainly English and Afrikaans speakers, can access sustained mother-tongue education beyond Grade 3. Most children who speak an African language at home switch early to English or Afrikaans as the language of learning. The department also reports that learners taught in their home language performed better in mathematics and natural sciences.
Mother-tongue-based bilingual education reached Grade 5 this year. It is being expanded in a system where eighty-one per cent of Grade 4 pupils could not read for meaning in the 2021 international literacy assessment. The educational psychologist Professor Kobus Maree warns that simply translating existing lessons is not enough, and that success depends on trained teachers and quality materials. Globally, the United Nations reports that forty per cent of learners lack education in the language they understand best.
Elsewhere, language learning is under quieter pressure. The British Council’s 2026 survey of more than a thousand schools in England found that about a quarter of primary schools had cut language time in favour of other subjects.
INSIGHT AND ANALYSIS
The case for languages has usually been practical: jobs, travel and trade. AI weakens that case, but not the deeper one. Writing in Daily Sabah, Aybike Açıkel argues that easier communication does not by itself create belonging, because “being able to understand one another does not necessarily mean understanding one another’s worlds.” Learning a language is slow, and the mistakes, questions and corrections along the way are themselves a form of human contact.
There is evidence that something real is at stake for children. A University of Miami study of children aged seven to twelve found that those who spoke two or more languages showed stronger executive function and better perspective-taking, the capacity to understand another person’s point of view. The researchers acknowledge that the wider “bilingual advantage” remains debated.
The risk lies less in translation itself than in how it is used. A study of adults in multilingual workplaces, published in May 2026, found that culturally adapted machine translation did not reduce people’s motivation to learn a language. The more control users felt they had handed to the AI, however, the weaker that motivation became. The study did not involve children, but its lesson travels: a tool that supports a learner is very different from a tool that does the learning for them.
IMPLICATIONS
For South Africa, the first priority is not foreign languages but children’s own. Children learn to think in the language they know best, and AI translation must not become an excuse to slow the investment in mother-tongue teaching. Translation tools can help produce materials in African languages, but they cannot replace a trained teacher.
For parents and schools, the practical answer is to treat translation as a scaffold rather than a substitute. Children can use it to read a story in another language and then talk about it, or to start a conversation with a classmate rather than avoid one. Schools should resist cutting language periods on the assumption that machines will cover the gap.
CLOSING TAKEAWAY
Machines will translate, and our children will often be better served for it. The reason to learn a language was never only to be understood. It is to understand: to meet a classmate, a grandparent or a stranger in their own words and on their own terms. A child who learns isiZulu, Sesotho or Afrikaans learns that other people see the world differently, and that the effort to reach them is worth making. No earpiece can make that effort on a child’s behalf.
Johan Steyn is a prominent AI thought leader, speaker, and author with a deep understanding of artificial intelligence’s impact on business and society. He is passionate about ethical AI development and its role in shaping a better future. Find out more about Johan’s work at https://www.aiforbusiness.net
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