The Story of French (57 page)

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 cultural 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.

In our travels we met dozens of people from non-francophone countries who were learning French simply because it was the language of France. Because it represents something bigger than itself, France continues to attract millions of foreigners to its language. Even within the francophonie, the spread of the language is rooted in ideas about France. At least fifty times more Irish than French migrated to the New World—one million, compared to at most fifty thousand—yet many more North Americans speak French today than Irish—at least eight million, compared to estimates of twenty thousand Gaelic speakers (there are allegedly a million speakers in Ireland). The francophones of America derived much of their cultural fortitude from speaking the language of France. And nowadays, what drives the interest in French is not just France, but the fact that French is truly a global language in every sense of the word. The only ones who don’t seem to pay attention to it are the French, and this particular myopia could be the undoing of France.

In Europe, much of the future of French depends on whether the Francophonie, Belgium and France manage to impose true plurilingualism on European institutions. It is a tall order, but the Belgians and French have won a surprising number of allies. Judging from statistics on second-language training in Europe, French is still in a category of its own—not anywhere near English, but far better off than German, Spanish or Italian. Outside of France, Romania and Moldova are proving to be lively centres of the language—Romania will be hosting the Francophonie summit of 2006. Romania is as francophone as Switzerland and almost as much as Belgium; its entry into the European Union in 2007 is bound to make waves in debates over the status of French in Europe. The biggest question mark is the status of Belgium, where the Flemish separatist movement is gaining strength day by day. It is possible that the country could split in the first decade of this century. If Flanders forces the partition of Belgium, what will become of Brussels and the Walloons?