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Twenty years ago, I wrote a report in the Senate entitled “So that languages live”. I then wanted to stimulate a debate on the learning of foreign languages in France. Which languages to choose? How to teach them? This debate did not take place, or rather, it remained at the level of the exchange of received ideas. Yet I still believe it is important. Also, I learned with pleasure and interest that a group of young people had undertaken to seize the problem and to write a study on “The learning of foreign languages in France”. Learning a language is important. But what are languages for? This is the fundamental question posed by Claude Hagège, linguist and professor at the Collège de France, in the introduction to the book he has devoted to the defense of linguistic and cultural diversity. Of course, languages are used to communicate. They are instruments and if a language is no longer suited to the services expected of it, another can be substituted. But a language is also the reflection of the deep identity of the community which invests in it essential symbolic values. Languages must therefore be respected out of respect for the human communities attached to them. The national language, for us French people, is our common good, the one that helps us to “make a nation”. We must have a perfect knowledge of it. But it is also necessary to speak one or more other languages to understand others, to dialogue with them, and also to trade.