This point was driven home to us by Stéphane Lopez, who runs the Francophonie’s program for promotion of French in the European Union. Part of Lopez’s job is to wrestle with people who argue that a single language (by which they mean English) is more efficient and less costly for translation. A single language is efficient only for those who master it. English has made remarkable progress in the European Union in the past ten years because non-anglophone diplomats accepted it. However, Lopez discovered that some European agencies have begun to reserve jobs for native English speakers only, on the grounds that they are more fluent in the extremely subtle word game of international diplomacy. “French, German or Italian diplomats have made concessions to English on the basis of courtesy, and also as a cheap means to further their career, but by doing so they have condemned their successors and their children to play second fiddle.”
Meanwhile, CEOs of French multinationals pride themselves on posting their communiqués in English, when they could at least post them in two versions. By the same token, it is remarkable that French scientists are not required to publish their studies in French as well as in English, as the Japanese are, as a condition of public funding. As one famous example has shown, it might even be to French scientists’ advantage. It took more than a decade for Pasteur Institute professor Luc Montaignier to prove that he had first identified the AIDS virus in 1983 and that the American scientist Robert Gallo had plagiarized his work, falsely claiming to have discovered the virus himself. Gallo had done the peer review for the English journal to which Montaignier had submitted his original findings. Had he published in French, Gallo would not have been able to claim paternity of Montaignier’s discovery. In fact, Gallo might even have had to learn French to stay up to date on research in the field. But as Professor Bernard Lecherbonnier puts it in his authoritative book Pourquoi veulent-ils tuer le français? (Why Do They Want to Kill French?), many French scientists have concluded that it is safer to join U.S. teams of scientists than try to make their name in the field in French.
It is useful to remember that the fundamental reason why English is where it is today is that the British and the Americans never lost their pride, even when they spoke a small language that nobody wanted to learn. As we saw in chapter 5, in the eighteenth century, when no one questioned the supremacy of French, the British recognized its usefulness and took what they needed from it, but never bought into arguments about its inherent value. In the end, it all boils down to choice.
Too much emphasis on how some francophones are surrendering to English might cast a shadow on the reasons for hope. As we mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, not all francophones have thrown in the towel on French. Some actions now being taken to defend French even suggest that the momentum against French is reversible. In diplomacy, the Francophonie countries scored a major victory with the UNESCO Convention on Cultural Diversity. At the European Union, the stellar rise in attendance for the French-language programs is promising. So far, few people are conscious of the fact that eleven of the twenty-five members of the European Union (soon to be thirteen out of twenty-seven, when Hungary and Romania join) are also members of the Francophonie. But if these countries play their cards skilfully on the issue of plurilingualism, the balance could tip in favour of the French geocultural sphere.
After years of pussyfooting and refusing to change their ways, French academic circles have begun merging universities and grandes écoles to make larger and more competitive institutions. This started when the first international ranking of universities produced by the University of Shanghai ranked only four French universities in the top hundred; some of the most prestigious écoles, such as the engineering Polytechnique, didn’t even place in the top two hundred! While a slap in the face to the French, the survey sent shock waves through the system and wiped out long-standing resistance to the idea of merging certain institutions. Since 2003 French institutions of higher learning have been undergoing a gigantic reorganization process. The grandes écoles have realized they are not so grand after all, and have accepted the idea of merging with universities.
And French literature is changing. Even if French authors are not as widely read as they used to be, France is finding ways to remain an important literary centre. In particular, French publishers are becoming more and more open to authors from languages other than French and English (the opposite trend is happening in the United States). In fact, many authors enter the international book trade when they are discovered by French publishers. Some have gone on to build considerable careers in French. Milan Kundera fled Czechoslovakia for Paris in 1975, wrote in Czech until 1989 and then switched to French. Canadian novelist Nancy Huston, originally from Calgary, learned French as a teenager in New Hampshire and then studied French literature at Harvard. She moved to Paris in the seventies, where she became part of a circle of left-wing intellectuals and began publishing in French. Spanish author Jorge Semprun fled Franco’s regime and moved to Paris in the 1940s. He began publishing in French in 1963 and published his first novel in Spanish only in 2003. Award-winning author André Makine left his native Russia and moved to France in 1987, where he began writing in French. And François Cheng, who studied French in China, became a naturalized French citizen in 1971 (that’s when he chose the name François). He was the first Asian to enter the French Academy, in 2002. And there are dozens of similar examples, not only in France, but also in Belgium and Quebec, not to mention the many francophone African authors who are now being studied in U.S. universities.
While French business people and CEOs may show a marked preference for English, they are still French, with the clout that carries. At the turn of the millennium 160 French companies opened shop in Slovenia. Overnight, registration for language classes doubled at the country’s French cultural centre. Evidently a number of ambitious Slovenians thought learning French would further their careers. The same thing happens wherever French companies and multinationals are active, whether it is Greenville, South Carolina, or Porto Alegre, Brazil.
Like the job market, the picture of any language is a dynamic one, which means that French makes progress in some areas and slips backward in others all the time. French is definitely losing steam in Egypt, but it’s holding its own in Israel and progressing in Hungary. It is regressing in Togo, a result of the recent arrival of U.S. oil companies, but progressing in Nigeria, where it recently became an official second language. In South Africa the Alliance française has launched a successful publicity campaign with the slogan “L’autre langue d’Afrique” (“Africa’s other language”); a third of the staff of the South African foreign affairs department is slated to learn French in the next three years. The largest chapter of the International Federation of Teachers of French is in the U.S., with ten thousand members; the second-largest is, surprisingly, in Brazil, with six thousand teachers. Though French is being taught in fewer places in Brazil, it remains strong where it matters, around Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo and near the border of French Guiana. “The new map for the demand of French doesn’t correspond at all to the old colonial map,” says Xavier North, who ran the French foreign affairs ministry’s department of cultural development and is now executive director of the Délégation générale à la langue française et aux langues de France. “French is an alternative for those seeking a different world view.”
From all the numbers we crunched on this issue, two certainties emerge: French, like English, is the only language present in every education system around the world. And, in countries where two second languages are mandatory, particularly in Europe, French is growing beyond expectations. Where education systems are not flourishing, France’s cultural diplomacy machine has been efficiently picking up some of the slack. Alain Marquer, who heads international development at the Alliance française, explained to us that the Alliance’s traditional adult clientele is changing. Because of cuts to language programs in schools, more and more parents are now sending their kids to the Alliance to learn French,
especially in developing countries. Parents evidently still think French is important enough to merit paying for lessons out of their own pockets. And overall, explains Marquer, the number of adult clients doesn’t diminish.
The case of the United States is odd. Because of their domination of the media, American perceptions shape many of the world’s perceptions. Yet even there the state of French is not bad, if not brilliant. The 2000 U.S. census has shown that the number of Americans who speak French at home, 1.6 million, makes French the number-four national language of the United States, after English, Spanish and Chinese, but well before Italian or German. This number has been stable for years. Yet the identity of these French speakers has changed. The traditional enclaves of New England and Louisiana have been shrinking, and the number of speakers of French has risen steadily in New York, California, Florida and Texas. In education too, statistics show that French is in a class of its own. Of the 1.4 million Americans who study language in institutions of higher learning, 53 percent have turned to Spanish and 15 percent to French—although the proportion has been declining, the number has been stable for 30 years. And the number of people who study French still exceeds the total studying the next three languages. All statistics concur on this point. (See Table 4 in the Appendix.)
According to Robert Peckham, professor of French at the University of Tennessee, the strong preference for Spanish in the United States is curious, because French is still a more practical foreign language to learn. Peckham, whose chutzpah has earned him the nickname “Tennessee Bob” in French-teaching circles, is a veritable French-language learning activist. He is known for pushing French with the formula “We need weapons of mass instruction.” His websites, Tennessee Needs French and New York Needs French, are gold mines of information. Peckham points out that Quebec alone is nearly as big a U.S. trade partner as Mexico, and gives examples of what Americans can learn from the French in agribusiness, nuclear power and aviation.
In fact, if French diplomats, scientists and CEOs read Tennessee Bob’s material, that alone might change their gloomy perspective about the future of French in the world.
Chapter 20 ~
The Unwritten Chapters
The remaining chapters in the story of French are not ours to write. We can see some emerging themes—the subjects of the last four chapters—but others are barely discernible. In Jerusalem, Tlemcen, Dakar, Lafayette, Caraquet, Paris, Sudbury, Monaco, Geneva, Brussels and Atlanta—in fact, everywhere we travelled for this book—we met francophones and non-francophones who had widely different views on the future of French. Some argued it has no future. Others said they couldn’t imagine the world without it. But between the extremes of optimism and fatalism, a few things remain clear. French is still a language of diplomacy, of science and of business. And most of all, it is still a global language that many people study and even more want to learn.
Who can foresee the tectonic shifts in geopolitics, knowledge, culture or technology that affect a language’s status? For that matter, who ever foresaw the ones that have already affected French? Who would have imagined that the forays of the Alliance israélite universelle in the 1860s would spawn a cultural diplomacy movement that would become the backbone of French public diplomacy, and remain so to this day? Who saw the French Revolution coming, or thought the French Academy would outlive the French monarchy? Who imagined that Haiti would become the world’s third republic, save French at the U.N. and give Canada a Governor General? It’s impossible to predict the future of any language. However, there are some clear forces, both linguistic and geocultural, that are changing French now.
Two centuries ago French was regarded as the universal language of Europe, even though it was confined to elite circles, and even though seventy-five percent of the French people did not yet speak it. Today twenty times more people speak French and the world’s elites are still learning it, sometimes for reasons quite similar to those that motivated them two centuries ago, sometimes for new ones. Not as many people are learning French as English, but there are still many more than are studying German, Arabic or Spanish (outside of the U.S.). More than ever, ideas, inventions, modernity, people and decisions are circulating freely among the various centres of French. Considering the fact that France and Belgium were the only hubs of French four decades ago, this new development is great testimony to its vitality.
But the French of the future will certainly be different from that of today. New linguistic trends have announced important shifts to come. Montaigne and Rabelais are difficult to read in the original text, and today’s Amin Maalouf or Michel Houellebecq will be equally difficult for francophones four centuries down the road.
The multiplication of French speakers will also provoke changes in the central ideology of French speakers: their purism. More than three centuries after the founding of the French Academy, the French obsession with defining language is still strong. But the multiplication of francophones—in France and around the world—has made it harder for purists to impose a rigid norme, both in France and in francophone countries.
Even in France the purists have always had trouble controlling the grassroots, even when there were only a couple of million speakers of French. Now that there are sixty million of them, the language is evolving even faster. While the French continue to profess faith in the norme, every day they generate new expressions, new pronunciations and new twists of syntax that are shaking the pillars of the norme. The French of 2006 is spoken and written with a casualness that would have shocked people fifty years ago—though it would have been music to the ears of Rabelais. Anglophone commentators usually notice the influence of English on French, but French has been undergoing changes in phonetics and semantics that have nothing to do with English. New words, foreign borrowings and lively inventions from other parts of the francophonie are finding their way into the mainstream faster than ever, through artistic creation, the media and particularly advertising. This constant quest for novelty on the part of so many speakers is what drives much of the creativity of the language, and what propels it away from the dictates of the ayatollahs of purism.
Are we seeing the end of the norme? Much the way that French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian are derivatives of Latin, French, like all international languages, will be a victim of its own success; it will become “corrupted” and it will change. Linguists are closely monitoring the language’s evolution in Ivory Coast and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where variations are veering towards a Creole of French. But so far, these two examples are more the exception than the rule. Outside of France, French competes directly with Wolof in Senegal, with Arabic in Lebanon and with English in North America. Yet the French norme plays a strong unifying role throughout the francophonie, and has given French a degree of cohesion that is unique among international languages. None of us will probably see the appearance of a new Creole of French in Africa during our lifetime, but perhaps our children and grandchildren will.
In addition to demography and linguistics, geopolitical developments will influence how the language spreads in France, Europe, America, Africa and beyond. France is both the greatest strength and the worst weakness of French, its backbone and its Achilles’ heel. What the French do, how they understand the world and how the world understands them, will continue to weigh heavily on the future of the French language.
The current anglomania among France’s diplomatic, scientific and business elites is often viewed with pessimism. In our opinion it may well be just a phase; French elites have gone through periodic phases of anglomania since the eighteenth century. In general it happens when the French think there is something deeply wrong with their society. They seek a diagnosis and a remedy, often turning to foreign languages as tools of exploration that will give them access to foreign concepts. The French elite did this with Italian in the sixteenth century, with English in the eighteenth century, and with German in the nineteenth century. The current phase of anglomania may lead to another cu
ltural rebound in French science, technology, business and governance.
Of course, the French world view is sometimes at odds with reality, especially when it concerns their language. Everyone agrees that the francophonie will play a crucial role in the future of French, but the French people are oddly oblivious to it. For instance, most histories of the French language produced by the French cover the linguistic peculiarities of French in Ivory Coast, Algeria and Quebec, but they rarely see these developments as part of French’s global progress. This sort of cultural myopia is dangerous; France could miss out on the francophonie the way it missed out on America four centuries ago. In 1763 Voltaire wrote, “France could live without Quebec.” French could also live without Dakar, Beirut, Brussels, Geneva, Abidjan and Kinshasa, but it is up to the French to decide whether they want to speak an international, or merely a national, language.
And then there is the question of how the French are perceived in the world. Neither the French nor anglophones are conscious that the French language owes some of its current prestige to the influence of English—both because of the way French and France embody values contrary to those of Anglo-American civilization, and because of the way English speakers continue to revere (and romanticize) both French and France. The visceral love/hate relationship that the Anglo-American elites have with France and French is a sociological curiosity. Fortunately their francophobia has been balanced by a healthy dose of francophilia. But much of the potential of this appeal depends on how the French tap into it at home, in the francophonie and in the world.
The Story of French Page 42