The AUF’s achievement has been to stimulate research in French and even raise the demand for French at some university campuses, notably in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe. French is still strong among the intellectual elite of Hungary, largely because of the AUF’s work. In Southeast Asia the number of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian university students who learn French or learn in French had risen to forty thousand in 2003, and the increase was due largely to the work of the AUF, which runs the Technology Institute of Cambodia, among other things. Such links are also being built elsewhere: Through the AUF, the biology department of the University of Havana is linked with the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and has developed a French-language option in the department. “We do all this with a forty-one-million-euro budget,” Michèle Gendreau-Massaloux, the rector of AUF, told us when we met her at her Paris office. “French is still a language of science. And not just for French-speaking countries.”
When you visit Beijing, Tokyo or London, your hotel TV will likely receive a French channel. And chances are it will be TV5, the world’s most successful French cable channel, to which 160 million households and three million hotel rooms subscribe worldwide. TV5 was created in 1984, when five TV channels (three French, one Belgian and one Swiss) decided to pool their programs into a sort of international TV digest—a collage of their best shows. TV5 did not have auspicious beginnings. It had trouble sticking to a schedule, and the programming choices were not as good as people expected. But the shows got progressively better as other TV channels joined in, most notably Radio-Canada, Canada’s National French-language network. In the mid-1990s TV5 acquired a strong private-sector management team and built an international distribution network of six thousand cable companies and fifty-five satellite operators. The channel invested heavily in subtitles in English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Dutch and Swedish to reach audiences outside the French-speaking world. Today, among international channels TV5 ranks third behind MTV and CNN, and ahead of BBC World, Aljazeera and Deutsche Welle. In Europe ninety million homes receive the French-language channel. In Algeria alone, two million people watch TV5.
TV5 also has an educational wing that produces a full range of services for French teachers abroad. Every month some forty thousand French teachers tap into TV5’s documentaries and series by consulting eight hundred thousand videos online, and thirty-two thousand teachers are registered in TV5’s “Teach and Learn” program. The website TV5.org offers tips on using the French language, an interactive French dictionary and dictation exercises by the popular literary critic and French-language guru Bernard Pivot. In Africa, where infrastructure is always a problem, TV5 is shown in ten télé-cafés called the Maisons TV5. These were created in Burkina Faso in 2001 and later spread to Benin and Senegal. TV5 is considering expanding the initiative to all developing countries.
In 2005, for the publication of our previous book, Jean-Benoît spent a couple of hours at TV5’s head office in Paris in the company of the channel’s assistant news director and star interviewer, Xavier Lambrecht. At a glance, the cramped office had more in common with a regional TV studio than an important international TV channel. As Lambrecht explained, “TV5 used to broadcast the national newscast of national channels. Now the staff rewrites every news item with the world in mind. We found ways of doing this with very little staff.” Specifically, TV5 has its own newsroom staffed with forty journalists who tap into fourteen affiliated networks, including Radio-Canada. By the time of the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, TV5 was in a position to deliver real-time reporting on location. During the Iraqi war it produced ten newscasts a day. It has managed to do all this with a shoestring budget of eighty-five million euros, twelve million of which go to the newsroom alone, a pittance compared to the thirty million dollars CNN spent covering the first month of the Iraqi war.
TV5’s mission has always been to break the quasi-monopoly of Anglo-American news images and content. Part of its success in doing so has come from the way it has positioned itself as an alternative media source between American news and Aljazeera. This approach is paying off: TV5’s biggest viewer gains in 2003 were in English-speaking countries such as the U.S., the U.K. and South Africa. In the latter two the public was attracted by the alternative news perspective. Since then TV5 has become a fixture at the U.N. headquarters in New York, a market from which it was totally absent before 2003.
Since 2005 TV5 has gone even further by relabelling itself TV5-Monde (TV5 World). The late Serge Adda, head of TV5 until his death in 2005 and the main brain behind the channel’s renewal, had been adamant about what he called the décloisonnement (decompartmentalization) of cultures. “I didn’t want an African film just to be for Africans. African cinema must be seen in Hanoi, Tokyo, Rio, Dakar, Cairo, and conversely.”
TV5’s motto, taken from seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, is “Le centre du monde est partout” (“The centre of the world is everywhere”). It could be the motto of the Francophonie as a whole, and in a way it is a good summary of the next chapters in the story of French.
Part Four ~
Change
Chapter 17 ~
The Struggle for Standards
While we were visiting Paris in the fall of 2005, the Catholic newspaper La Croix published a special issue exploring why kids from well-off areas were mimicking the speech of the cités, the low-income suburban housing developments, particularly around Paris. These suburbs, largely populated by African and North African immigrants, are well-known for producing vibrant forms of Arabic-influenced argot. But as the journalists from La Croix noted, middle-class French teenagers had also started to bousculer (upset, shake up) French, using the language of the cités. To illustrate the phenomenon, one journalist quoted an SMS (short message service) text message passed from one French teenager to another on a cell phone: “Kestufé? Tnaz? Je VO6né. A2M’1.” It was a phonetic transcription, mixing letters and numbers, of “Qu’est-ce tu fais? T’es naze? Je vais au ciné. À demain” (“What are you doing? Are you out of it? I’m going to see a movie. See you tomorrow”).
It was hardly a coincidence that La Croix was exploring the question of argot at this particular time. Several weeks earlier, two youths in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois had been electrocuted when they hid from the police inside a transformer. Violence had been brewing for decades in France’s cités, but the intensity of the reaction to these deaths stunned the French. Uprisings started around Paris and quickly spread to poor suburbs throughout France, where they went on for four weeks. Every night residents gathered to protest, while disaffected youth throughout France took to burning cars at the rate of a thousand a day. French newspapers, TV and radio examined the situation, first from the angle of immigration policies, then of France’s failure to integrate immigrants and the role of Islam in the suburbs, before finally looking at it through the lens of language.
Using examples like that of the SMS message, La Croix journalists reported that, more and more, French writing was imitating speech rather than speech imitating writing (still considered the ideal in French). They noted that young people were using bad grammar (the qu’est-ce tu fais rendered into kestufé is incorrect; the correct form would be qu’est-ce QUE tu fais); acknowledged the generalization of slang (the expression naze originated in argot); and pointed out how teenagers were using phonetic rather than proper spellings, and even numbers.
While the La Croix journalists presented their observations as groundbreaking, there was nothing really new about what they wrote. During the two years we spent researching this book, almost all the teachers and commentators we met bemoaned the “declining” state of French in exactly the same terms as those used by the La Croix journalists.
Is French really in decline? In the debates over what constitutes ideal versus real French, there is a lot of speculation about where French is going. What is clear is that French is changing. Linguists and sociolinguists have assessed the nature of these changes, or suppo
sed changes, in phonetics, grammar and vocabulary, particularly since 1945. Some of their observations are surprising; at the very least, they prove that change has been going on for centuries and that, contrary to purist ideology, the French language is not fixed, but in constant evolution. But studies also suggest that change is not happening the way most francophones assume it is. Most of this discussion will concentrate on France, with examples from other francophone locations, a choice we made for two reasons. First, we have already established that there are great linguistic variations among francophone countries. And second, France remains to this day the focal point of “standard French”—whether true or imagined—whether linquists call it “central French”, “standard French,” “Parisian French” or “French from France.”
Linguists agree that the most impressive changes in standard French since 1945 have been not in vocabulary, but in pronunciation. Prior to the phonograph, there was no way to record the way people spoke, and before the 1920s, recording quality was so bad that only the clearest, cleanest French could be understood. Linguists had to speculate on pronunciation from rhyming in songs and poetry and other less than scientific sources. But even what they found back then should have shaken the certainty of francophones on the supposed fixité (fixedness) of their language. Molière, in the first act of his famous play The Misanthrope, makes je trouve (I find) rhyme with veuve (widow). The very colloquial term mec (guy) was a nineteenth-century truncation of maquereau (pimp), which people then pronounced mèquereau.
New technologies have, of course, made it possible to study phonetics more thoroughly. At the end of the 1990s, for the twenty-sixth volume of the Histoire de la langue française 1945–2000, linguist Fernand Carton put together an extensive description of French pronunciation at the turn of the millennium. Some of Carton’s findings were surprising—notably, the fact that the accentuation (that is, stress or emphasis) in standard French has been shifting since the Second World War. Among the world’s languages, French has traditionally been famous for its lack of accentuation. If there was any, the stress in words fell on the last syllable and, in sentences, on the last word—known as oxytonism. According to Carton that’s now changing. French accentuation today is moving towards the penultimate (second-last) syllable in about half its words. One hears it in the lyrics of popular French music, especially in rap and rock. The change is so profound that French speakers not only pronounce final E’s that should be silent, they frequently pronounce an E at the end of words where there is none, to mark the displacement of the tonal accent. For example, they say DONC-e (so), bonJOUR-e and au reVOIR-e. In Carton’s opinion, Central French is moving back to the tonal system it had in the Middle Ages, which was similar to that of German, English and Italian today, and resembles the French spoken in southern France.
At the same time, some E sounds are disappearing. The French E is a ubiquitous vowel that often works as filler in a language that has few groupings of consonants (the kind one sees in swim or sprout in English, or in bleibst or abschneiden in German). But now the French are beginning to group consonants in their sentences, at least through pronunciation, by dropping the vowels between consonants, especially the E’s. Sentences like “Je me le demande” (“I am wondering”) are now pronounced j’m’le d’mand or je me l’demand.
The consonant system of French has changed very little. However, the pronunciation of vowels, known as vocalization, has changed considerably, and is continuing to do so. Diphthongs disappeared in Paris long ago. Other changes that started centuries ago are now reaching completion, such as the disappearance of long vowels. Around Paris today, words like mettre (to put) and maître (master) are pronounced exactly the same way (with a sharp è sound; the ai used to be a long vowel in the latter). The two pronunciations of the short A have also been blurred: pâte (dough) used to sound like pawt but now sounds like patte (leg). Finally, nasal vowels such as in, an, on and un have almost been merged into a single vowel (a cross between an and on). As a result, in France a phrase like “un bon pain brun” (“a good brown bread”) now tends to sound like ahn bahn pahn brahn (the vowels still have distinct sounds in other places, notably Quebec). This change in pronunciation explains why French children write A2M’1 (literally, à deux m’un) for à demain. Un used to be pronounced uhn but it is now pronounced so it rhymes with demain. A similar process of merging is happening with two pronunciations of the vowel E. The È (eh) is moving towards É (ay), which is why La Croix’s sample SMS message read Je V for je vais—such a shorthand could not have occurred three generations ago, when vais was pronounced veh.
Of course, these changes in pronunciation apply mainly to Paris, and are not happening in other parts of France or in the francophonie at the same pace, if at all. A Quebec teen not already familiar with the expression would probably have to make a real effort to decode a French teen’s “Je VO6né. A2M’1” (although the codes are crossing the Atlantic). And the process is advancing quickly in France. A recent cover of the French magazine Historia’s language special edition said “1539: f1 du Lat1” (f’un du Lat’un, or fin du Latin: the end of Latin).
In addition to pronunciation, some considerable shifts in French grammar are taking place. The way to ask questions, for example, has changed. In 1900 the acceptable way of asking “What is a cormorant?” was “Qu’est un cormoran?” Today, there are five ways to ask the question: “Qu’est-ce qu’un cormoran?” “Qu’est-ce que c’est qu’un cormoran?” “Qu’est-ce que c’est, un cormoran?” “Un cormoran, c’est quoi?” and “C’est quoi un cormoran?” Finally, in France and throughout the francophonie, speakers are tending more and more to substitute on (one) for nous (we) and drop the ne in the negative in ne…pas.
But the most considerable change in grammar has been the almost total extinction of an entire verb tense, the passé simple (simple past). This is true throughout the francophonie. Nobody says je marchai (I walked). They say j’ai marché (literally “I have walked,” but understood as “I walked”). The passé simple is now restricted to some genres of literature and used only in the first or third person singular. In everyday speech it has been replaced by the passé composé (equivalent of the present perfect) or the présent historique (the present tense used to convey the past).
This shift is not happening because francophones are losing their capacity to conjugate verbs, or their grasp on time. It is happening because verb conjugation in the passé simple is clumsy, so speakers decided to find a way around it. French verbs are divided into three groups: the first group, those ending in -er (marcher, manger, chanter); the second group, regular verbs ending in -ir (finir, salir, rôtir); and the third group, irregular verbs ending in -ir, -oir, -aindre, -endre (sortir, voir, craindre, rendre). The endings for most tenses follow pretty much the same pattern for all three groups. For instance, the imparfait (imperfect, equivalent of the past continuous) for marcher is je marchais; for courir it’s je courais; and for voir it’s je voyais. But in the passé simple, endings vary according to the verb group, making these verbs je marchai, je courus, je vis. In the plural it gets even more complicated: vous marchâtes, vous courrûtes, vous vîtes.
Before universal schooling in France, when only a few lettrés spoke the language, the passé simple stood the test of common usage. But after the Second World War, when millions of people were speaking French in their day-to-day lives, people found the passé simple just too complicated. To avoid engaging in linguistic gymnastics every time they opened their mouths, they started using the passé composé instead, where the past is marked by a standard auxiliary (être or avoir) combined with the past participle. Any speaker would need to know the past participle to conjugate a verb in other past tenses anyway. By the same logic, another verb tense, the subjonctif imparfait (past subjunctive), has been completely assimilated to the present subjunctive, or even the regular present tense, because of its clumsiness.
French speakers might not have abandoned the passé simple had French grammarians b
een more attuned to their needs. In Spanish, the Real Academia systematized conjugations, and the simple past is still used. But since no one ever simplified it in French, francophones just voted with their feet and walked away from it. It’s not the first time francophones have taken grammatical problems into their own hands, and it won’t be the last. Linguist Louis-Jean Calvet has noticed that all the new verbs created since the 1950s have the regular -er ending, as in solutionner, which is more convenient than the grammatically clumsy résoudre (find solutions). In other words, francophones have developed a way of simplifying the verb system on their own, without waiting for academicians to move on the matter. Like many linguists, Calvet believes that it’s popular French—not grammarians or the French Academy—that is doing the work of standardizing French today.
The jury is still out, however, on some extreme grammatical oddities of French such as accord (agreement in gender and number) of the participles of verbes pronominaux (reflexive verbs such as se parler, to talk to oneself) and the even more common accord du participe passé avec avoir (agreement of participles of verbs whose auxiliary is the verb “to have,” as in j’ai voulu, I wanted). Normally, French verbs agree with the subject’s number—a single person veut (wants), but three people veulent. And in the participle form, verbs also agree with gender: elles sont allées. However, in the cases of the participle of pronominal verbs and those of verbs that have avoir as an auxiliary, things have never been easy. Here, the verb should agree with the object, not the subject, if it is a direct object and the object is placed before the verb. A good example is je les ai voulus (I wanted those, or them), where the past participle is put in the plural form even though the subject is singular, because those or them (the plural direct object) is placed before the verb. As if that’s not complicated enough, the rule has plenty of exceptions. Ninety-nine percent of francophones never fully master the exceptions to the rule and require a dictionary, a grammar or a spell checker to get it right. Most francophones who claim to have mastered the rule have actually just learned to avoid the exceptions.
The Story of French Page 35