Sarah Sands: Clever Clegg minds his languages - all six of them

As Nick Clegg fell fluently into German during his visit to Berlin last week, his senior Cabinet colleague William Hague held fast to his translation earphones so he could understand what the Deputy Prime Minister was saying. I bet he did. Anything could have been going on. Clegg could have signed Britain up to the euro.

A mastery of foreign languages is regarded by most of us with admiration – and suspicion. Clegg is more connected to European blood lines than the Royal Family, and can converse in most countries. He famously has five languages, six if you count his much-admired body language. It is not a question of token phrases. When John F Kennedy said "Ich bin ein Berliner" (before bashfully calling out for a translator) he was cheered wildly for managing four words. Clegg gabbled about the mist in Britain and the sun in Berlin before advancing to a meteorological metaphor about the refreshing German air being an omen for "our strengthening relationship".

Hague, who knows only Yorkshire drizzle, must have taken a dim view of his political colleague, a former ski instructor, and his fondness for high diplomatic altitudes. More wondrous than Clegg's German is his Dutch. His effortless conversation with Dutch journalists on a train has made YouTube. He did not just speak in Dutch, he gestured and ruminated and made jokes in Dutch.

I felt a hot itch of shame watching the footage. I am the daughter of a fervent European who worked for some years in Brussels furthering good relations. I am sorry to say that I developed a sulky adolescent resistance to speaking French or German, and an aggressive stance towards European popular music, little dogs and the urinating boy fountain. For sarcastic entertainment, my siblings and I would watch Dutch television. When children invent a language it sounds like Dutch. I remember the Dutch for "killed instantly" being so exaggeratedly guttural that we would repeat it gasping with mirth.

The Philistinism towards foreign languages is bad enough. Worse, is the sense that it is boastful and somehow unpatriotic to use another language.

The fact is that there is no need for an English person to learn another language. English is what we have given the world. It is our great export, especially now BP isn't doing so well. There are surely more people speaking English in China these days than in Britain. President Obama may have mixed feelings about colonial heritage, but he expresses them in English. He once told an audience, with calculated self deprecation, that he could not speak any other language, despite his international upbringing. He urged his fellow Americans to do better: "It's embarrassing when Europeans come over here – they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe and all we can say is 'merci beaucoup', right?" Naturally, the President was immediately denounced by the Americans for Legal Immigration lobby group: "Obama has stepped on a political landmine by stating Americans should be forced to learn to speak Spanish." Since America's second language is Spanish, this denial may be holding back the tide.

In the same way, we are getting tougher about immigrants learning to speak English. We want to know what they are saying. Do not think us paranoid, but the Mail last week speculated whether Miriam Clegg's new job as adviser to a Spanish company building British wind farms was revenge for the Armada. It works both ways. If we want to change our tone towards the rest of Europe, we need only to speak their languages. Tear up the Lisbon Treaty, but do so in Dutch.