There was a line Nicola Sturgeon kept repeating. Scotland, the former first minister would often say, deserved the chance to be an “outward-looking nation”.

I am sure she meant it. The old SNP leader, after all, wore her internationalism relatively easily.

Whatever her harshest critics say, Scotland’s longest serving FM was certainly not a navel-gazing national chauvinist.

Ms Sturgeon, of course, was talking of her aspirations for an independent Scotland, not the reality of a devolved one.

Did her period in office make Scots more outward-looking? Pass. But she certainly failed on one crude but crucial measure: how many of our teenagers take what amounts to an early intermediate test in another language.

This year there were just 6000 Higher entries for learners of French, Spanish, German and a handful of other tongues. These figures bobble around over the years as, of course, will the size of each year’s cohort. But it is worth zooming out to get the big picture on language study in the senior phase of our schools. Because the decline is simply shocking.

The number of Higher entries for languages - modern and ancient - has nearly halved since devolution.

There were nearly 12,000 entries in the spring of 1999, just as the Scottish Parliament was reconvened.

Now, Highers are not the be-all-and-end-all of learning. They are just the easiest way to count the decline in school language study.

However, I think these numbers point to something that is very far from Ms Sturgeon’s vision of an “outward-looking” Scotland. They suggest a dramatic, shameful national retreat in to monoglot insularity.

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School language learning is not just twirling verb wheels or getting lost in preposition tables and vocab lists. It is - ultimately - how we introduce our young people to the rest of the world, how we equip them to “look out”.

Hey, Scotland brims with people who strongly identify as internationalist despite never taking the time - or having the opportunity - to learn how to talk “foreign”. I bet they are sincere.

But we should start to be honest with ourselves. Without society-wide language learning - and political, individual and commercial decisions to support this - we are never going to be meaningfully “outward-looking”.

I don’t believe for a minute that Ms Sturgeon or any of her predecessors in Bute House actually wanted to see fewer teens do Highers in, say, French or German.

Various Holyrood administrations have talked the talk on languages. Experts and teachers will argue the toss of their different stances, rhetoric and initiatives. Let them.

The numbers speak for themselves: whatever we are doing, it is not working. And this is not just a Scottish problem.

Qualifications in the rest of the UK are not directly comparable to our own. But the trends are.

The figures for A-level entries for modern languages tell a grim story. This year just over 7000 sat French, according to figures released this week. Back in 1994 the same figure was more than 29,000. This historic decline should make us gasp.

To be fair, there are real challenges to overcome.

Britain is stuck in a golden cage of English. Almost all of our residents speak a global lingua franca or something very close to it. Does this disincentivise some learners? Of course it does. But is this an insurmountable challenge? Definitely not.

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Ireland too remains largely English-speaking. And it has not seen the declines experienced in the UK.

Again, it is hard to compare qualifications - education authorities are coy about benchmarking their qualifications - but in broadbrush terms Irish youngsters are still routinely doing modern languages at the senior stage of school while Scottish, Welsh and English ones are not.

Our retreat from language learning is not the fault of teachers and it is not the fault of pupils. It is an unintended consequence of decisions made by our politicians and other leaders.

It is tempting to see our declining language learning through a prism of constitutional politics. As I - rather cynically - did to drag you in to this column. But a largely monoglot Scotland really would face huge practical challenges as an independent state.

This time last year The Herald reported that experts were wondering out loud how Scotland could meaningfully re-enter the EU. We are, they said, just not producing enough linguists to participate in basic bloc administration.

They made a fair point. So too - potentially at least - do those who link society-level declines in language learning with everything from rising public xenophobia to the 2016 Brexit vote.

It was not always this way.

Scotland’s last big champion of language learning was probably Michael Forsyth. A decade before political devolution the Tory Scottish Office minister pushed an agenda called Languages for All. Mr Forsyth had his critics. But his logic was straightforward: Scots needed to get ready for greater European integration and all the jobs and business opportunities it offered.

READ MORE: Scotland way behind Ireland in pupils learning languages

Business will still say Scotland has a language skills deficit, even after we have left the EU. Let’s not be coy here: our monoglot culture is making us poorer. But is the private sector willing to invest in languages? Mostly no. It wants government to do that.

Which brings us to the heart of our story: language learning, though academically no more challenging than other subjects, is expensive. Schools need smaller classes and more learning assistants than they would for some of the courses replacing French, German and Spanish in the Highers and A-Level league tables.

Even with a Herculean political will, our languages emergency will likely get worse before it gets better. Bluntly, with each passing year fewer parents are able to help their children with their homework, fewer citizens know what it is our young are missing. 

Are we are heading back to the late 1940s when Scottish education officials talked of language learning as being for a “bookish minority”. Are we ready to talk about what this means for what kind of country we are becoming? Are we even equipped to hold a national conversation about this? I am not sure we are.