There are lots of good reasons to learn a language. For instance, I've taken up French again because I want to be able to speak intelligently to my niece, who lives in France. My heart sinks at the thought of future conversations where I rely on desperate phrases like: "Phew, il fait tres chaud ici à Lyon! En Ecosse, il pleut toujours, ha ha ha!" I can imagine her now, replying with devastating Gallic poise and a barely perceptible roll of the eyes. "Oui, Tatie Bec, je sais." And she's only one.

For Susan Najm, the catalyst for a lifelong love of English came in the unlikely form of the 1980s mega-soap Dallas. Najm had only basic English grammar when she arrived in the UK from Iran, aged 16, with her mother and brother. She found her English classes at school exhausting, but a yearning to know the latest on what dastardly J R had done to tragic Sue Ellen suddenly made learning English her number-one priority. "You so want to be a part of the culture, fit in and find out what's going on," she says, with real feeling. "Dallas is responsible for making me learn English."

There is no reliable research on the role of Dallas in language teaching, alas, but what we do know is that dedication and confidence count for a lot. When the Italian Fabio Capello, the new England football manager, predicted recently that he would learn English in a month, he said so with a confidence born of having already mastered one foreign language, Spanish. Commitment and a positive attitude won't turn him into Melvyn Bragg in four weeks, but then he doesn't need to be. And time will help. Twenty-nine years after her arrival, Susan Najm speaks English better than many Brits - and keeps up her Farsi, too, working as a volunteer at the Scottish Refugee Council's offices in Glasgow.

Like every other bilingual I have spoken to, she is passionate about the value of learning a language. This sets her apart from many native English speakers. Statistics from the Scottish Qualifications Authority show a slow but steady decline in the take-up of second languages at Higher and Advanced Higher level in schools. The number of pupils sitting these exams in French, Gaelic, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish has dropped by more than 6% since 2002, with German and French showing the biggest declines. Statistics on adults learning foreign languages are harder to come by, although anecdotal evidence suggests the figures are more stable. Chantal Juge, course director of l'Institut Francais d'Ecosse in Edinburgh, says it has a healthy cohort of 500 students in each of its two annual sessions, the numbers having settled after a period of decline: 10 years ago there were three times as many students.

Why is this? At school level, languages are in competition with a much expanded choice of other subjects, explains Joanna McPake, director of the Scottish Centre for Information on Language Teaching. "Children are choosing five Highers out of a much longer list than they had in the 1970s." Then there is English's undisputed status as the global lingua franca. What's the point in learning Italian, goes the familiar refrain, when it is spoken only in Italy?

Yet the utilitarian value of knowing another language is the least of its attractions, according to those bilinguals who feel that speaking two or more languages articulately makes for a rounded, outward-looking character. Dr Joseph Gafaranga, a senior lecturer in linguistics at Edinburgh University, speaks Kinyarwanda, spoken all over Rwanda and surrounding countries, as well as English and French, and has studied how being bilingual affects a person's attitudes and identity. He is in no doubt that speaking two languages articulately tends to make people more outward-looking and tolerant. "Very early on, you develop an awareness of diversity," he says. According to his colleague Antonella Sorace, professor of developmental linguistics at Edinburgh and an authority on bilingualism, bilingual children have more "awareness of the other": that is, they understand at an earlier age that others may have a different perspective from their own.

Sara Valentin, editor of Scotland's Homes, The Herald's property section, wholeheartedly agrees. She was brought up in France speaking English and French by her Scottish mother and French father, and says she and her brother would switch between the two languages within one sentence. "I think it makes you a lot more open-minded," she says. She was required to take two languages at school; now living in Scotland, and bringing up two children of her own, she considers it "absolutely appalling" that so many people choose not to bother with a second language. "It's crucial, especially with Europe becoming closer."

Cultures that are closed to other languages run the risk of becoming "one-dimensional": that is the view of The Herald's David Leask, who speaks English and Russian. He and his wife have brought up their son, now 17, to speak both languages, something that has given him a "wider outlook on the world".

Leask is passionately supportive of efforts to support Scotland's 60,000-strong home-grown bilingual community of Gaelic speakers. It doesn't matter which language you learn, he says; the point is that "bilingualism allows for the experience of enjoying a culture without it having to be an effort". Provided you can speak a language articulately, it lets you live another culture from the inside instead of merely admiring it from the outside.

Susan Najm puts it this way: "It's just like having a passport. If you don't have a language it is like being in transit, standing on the border of a country and looking in." She is now bringing up her two sons to speak Farsi as well as English, and says learning languages is easier when you are young. She says she found that learning Dutch in adulthood "was like pulling teeth".

Sara Valentin, who has also studied German and Spanish, says she would have no fear of learning another language now, and puts her facility for languages down to the fact that, if you are bilingual, "your brain is attuned to how languages work". Is this really the case? Yes, according to Professor Sorace. Bilingual children have higher "metalinguistic awareness" - that is, sensitivity to how language works as a system. Those who have learned a second language as young children are also better at learning languages later on.

Of course, many of us would love to be bilingual but feel it is too late by adulthood. Sorace says the best "window of opportunity" for acquiring language is in the first two to three years of life. But this is not to say learning later than that is a lost cause; far from it. You can still become proficient in a language if you learn it at school or in adulthood. And many people are doing so as a result of buying second homes or retiring abroad.

Fidelma Cook, who writes a column in our Saturday magazine, learned French at school and studied French, German, Spanish, Italian and Russian on a foreign correspondents' course afterwards, but was never fluent. Forty years later, when she moved to France, she took an intensive immersion course at the Alliance Francaise in Glasgow, in which only French is spoken - a method she describes as "definitely recommended".

Now living in south-west France, she says: "I would not dream of considering myself bilingual. I'm coping, just. At first my head pounded after 10 minutes trying to speak and understand at the same time. Now I can just about do an hour. There's a moment when you float' and just go with it - and the second you think about what you're doing or saying, you stop floating, drop and can't understand a word. That's the second when you look into their eyes and think, I haven't a clue what you've just said. And you thought we were getting on so well, too.' "Being able to sit down and read a paper or even a book in French is not the same as being able to chat away at dinner. I find red wine helps a lot - I get more fluent as the night goes on."

Joanna McPake has been teaching languages to adults for years and says there are two widely held myths: that they are difficult (they're not) and that only a few people have what it takes (nonsense). What you do need, however, is a willingness to put in the effort. "It's probably helpful to compare it to athletics," she says. "There are some people who have a natural ability and are going to win gold medals, but that doesn't mean no-one else should do any exercise."



Learning a new language as an adult

  • First, set yourself goals.
  • Classes can be good, especially if all the teaching is in the language, such as at the Institut Francais (www.ifecosse.org.uk) or Alliance Francaise (www.afglasgow.org.uk).
  • Internet learning: like CDs with better support. Recommended: www.coffeebreakspanish.com.
  • Distance learning: Skye's Gaelic college has an excellent beginners' course (www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/en/cursaichean/inntrigidh/index.php).
  • CDs and books: effective if you're disciplined. Recommended: www.teachyourself.co.uk and www.michelthomas.co.uk
  • Maximise your exposure by watching DVDs (with subtitles) and reading the easy bits of newspapers online (TV listings, weather).



Five tips on improving your French in France, by Fidelma Cook:

  • People won't ridicule your efforts to speak. They appreciate it.
  • Leave on French TV (however bad) for at least an hour a day.
  • Use your shoulders when talking: you're halfway there.
  • Talk to a butcher. They'll listen to your spluttering chat for hours.
  • It's not a cafe au lait; it's "un creme".