This vitality is one of the reasons why francophones have their own star system in literature, film, music and more, in spite of the global reach of American pop culture. Céline Dion and Gérard Depardieu may be the only names known to non-francophones, but singers such as Garou and Johnny Hallyday, poets such as Luc Plamondon and Amadou Kourouma, authors such as Michel Houellebecq and Tahar Ben Jelloun, and actors such as Gad Elmaleh or Djamel Debbouze are household names among francophones all over the world.
There is no doubt that francophones are borrowing liberally from English. But is it fair to deduce that they are insecure about their language? Given the amount of time and energy francophone societies spend thinking and talking about their language, it’s not surprising that Anglo-American commentators have so often jumped to this conclusion. However, these commentators usually overlook an important phenomenon among francophones: their attachment to the norme, to language rules and standards. Far from being a defensive reaction to the growing influence of English—as it is often portrayed—attachment to the norme is a cultural feature among francophones that has its own history and significance.
While most native English speakers (and many French speakers as well) assume that the progress of English is hurting the prospects of French, we found that, globally, that’s just not happening. Language is not a zero-sum game. There definitely appears to be a struggle: Outside France and Algeria, most francophones in the world are a minority in their country and have long had to fight for their language. But with the exception of Quebec, most of these efforts by francophones have been, and continue to be, directed towards other languages, not English. The French themselves are not insecure about their language and are not particularly concerned about English, for a simple reason: So far, they have no need to be.
How did French develop, spread and acquire its own set of values? And why does it remain important? These are the central questions underlying The Story of French. Throughout this narrative we explain the events that spawned the different features of French: its intense politicization, the rigidity of its rules, the sense of cultural exceptionality that inhabits every French speaker, the centrality of France, the adherence of all francophones to language norms and regulations, and even the influence of French on English—and vice versa. Geographical and political circumstances; decisions by important political figures; French and Belgian colonial policies and practices; the world wars; trade; the export of literature, art, cinema and luxury products, industrial policies and scientific discoveries—all of these, and more, have shaped French. The Story of French is divided into four parts, representing the main stages in the story of the language: origins, spread, adaptation and change. In each we relate the events, people and places, large and small, that shaped the destiny of the French language, from the temerity of William the Conqueror to the staunchness of Cardinal Richelieu, the charisma of Voltaire and the determination of Red Cross founder Henri Dunant, to Quebec’s language laws and Léopold Sédar Senghor’s activism in the wake of African independence. As far as we know, this is the first popular history of the language that addresses these issues in a narrative that stretches from Charlemagne to actress Jodie Foster, who appears in French films speaking perfect French—a pure product of France’s cultural diplomacy efforts.
Sociolinguists often joke that a language is a dialect with an army. We are not linguists ourselves, but graduates of political science, history and English literature, and we sympathize with this view. Although we do discuss linguistics in four chapters, our general approach is sociolinguistic rather than purely linguistic (readers who are looking for detailed accounts of grammatical or spelling developments can consult the books listed under “The French Language” and “Linguistics and Other Languages” in the Selected Bibliography). The Story of French approaches French as a dialect with an army, a navy and an economy, strong diplomatic skills, aggressive cultural policies and ideas and, of course, some luck. The spread of French, like that of many international languages, was a by-product of these factors, though the French language persisted in some countries even after these forces had disappeared.
The Story of French includes spectacular failures and unexpected successes, and it is not always a nice story. Colonialism, slavery and genocide have all happened in French. It is by no means our intention to endorse these horrors, but, from the perspective of dissemination of European languages, they cannot be overlooked. Monstrous though they were, the Spanish conquest of the Americas, the deportation of the Acadians, the massacre of Australian Aborigines, the Angolan slave trade and the seventh-and eighth-century jihads all played an important role in making English, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic into international languages. Languages do not become international for nothing.
Of course, war and violence weren’t the only ways in which French spread. In the 1950s the French philosopher, author and Nobel Prize–winner Albert Camus said, “Ma patrie, c’est la langue française” (“My country is the French language”). Camus was born in Algeria into a family of European settlers, and although he’s a French icon, he was a francophone in spirit. His famous comment expressed a reality that few people understood in postwar Europe. Already traditional borders were becoming less important and language was becoming a new frontier. The French had already understood this at the end of the nineteenth century, when they began actively exporting their language in the form of international networks of French schools, Alliances françaises and cultural centres. World leaders in the field of cultural diplomacy, the French—and francophones—are still expanding the frontiers of French with their “soft power.”
In writing the Story of French, we had to confront many prejudices, not only about French, but also about English. Many serious writers are convinced that English is sweeping the planet, because it is better suited than any other language to commerce, trade, logic, popular culture and even democracy. Many also claim that the success of English comes from its special capacity for absorbing new words. In our opinion, this is ethnocentrism applied to language. Saying that English is especially suited to trade is a little like saying that French is especially suited to cuisine; there are good historical reasons why each language came to be associated with these activities (although plenty of business is also carried out in French, and plenty of good cooking is done in English). Writers rarely mention, for instance, how the British Navigation Act of 1652 got English off to a good start. The Act banned all non-British ships or crews from landing at British ports, which destroyed Dutch commerce, led to the downfall of Holland’s navy and opened the seas to British control, greatly enhancing British trade. The fact that in the twentieth century one English-speaking empire (the United States) replaced another (Great Britain) certainly helped boost the prospects of English, to put it mildly.
But we did not write The Story of French to compare the fates of French and English—there is no comparison. English has achieved an international presence that is unprecedented in the history of languages. The English language has become so prevalent in world affairs that most educated people in most modern, developed countries no longer consider it a foreign language—including the French. Yet, as we show, English is not the only global language. And, more important, it is not erasing the differences in how language groups think and see the world. The destruction of the World Trade Center showed everyone that religion is still an important mental frontier that defines cultures. Christians have bought millions of books on Islam since September 11, 2001, in an effort to understand the events of that day. And, in our globalized world, language is also a mental frontier.
One of those mental frontiers is French. When we went to Paris in 1999, our neighbour, Thorfinn Johnston, was a Scot from the Orkney Islands. As Thorfinn himself pointed out, he had much more in common with Julie, an English-speaking North American, than he did with his fellow Europeans the French. The same is true of Jean-Benoît and his French, Algerian and Senegalese friends; they share something inaccessible that goes beyond mere wo
rds or cultural references. A translated novel by Michel Houellebecq or Michel Tremblay remains inherently French (in the case of Houellebecq) or Québécois (in the case of Tremblay).
The Story of French explores what’s inside the mental universe of French speakers. French has been an important global language practically from the moment it became distinct from Latin, and throughout its history it has functioned as a vector for a distinct set of values. French carries with it a vision of the State and of political values, a particular set of cultural standards and even a clear idea of its role in the world, though this has changed drastically over the centuries. Francophones are also united in their strong adherence to norms, contrary to English speakers, because French relies on strict written rules to define its grammar, lexicon and syntax.
As many chapters of this book show, the French language has remained influential not only in spite of but also because of the influence of English. English speakers have always reserved a pre-eminent place for French in their culture and, to a certain extent, as it sweeps the planet English is carrying and spreading this vision of French with it. By the same token, some of French’s power to promote itself comes from the fact that, more than any other language, it offers a counterbalance to the influence of English.
This last point is crucial. In countries such as Israel, Mexico and Egypt, all clearly outside the French sphere of influence, elites still school their children in French. The U.S. and Mexico have the two biggest networks of Alliances françaises in the world. The Egyptian elite in Alexandria began schooling their children in French lycées to counterbalance the influence of British colonialism, and some still do so now to resist American hegemony; the former secretary-general of the Francophonie and of the United Nations, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, is a product of that philosophy. As French linguist Henriette Walter, author of Honni soit qui mal y pense, a history of the relationship between the French and English languages, told us, English speakers are not necessarily conscious of it, but “people are still proud to belong to the club of French speakers.”
Comparing French-speaking countries did raise some problems for us. For one thing, statistics on the English and French languages are somewhat crude. One reason is that it is difficult to define exactly what is a French speaker or an English speaker. Both are not only native languages but also important languages of choice in many other countries. The various people designing surveys don’t always make the same distinctions between different types of speakers (native, partial or occasional, for example). When talking about francophones we use the generally accepted figure of 175 million speakers, but that doesn’t count the estimated 100 million occasional speakers or the 100 million French students in the world. (In the case of English, the same categories vary even more widely, from 375 million to 600 million native speakers, plus an additional 500 million occasional speakers and 500 million students.)
We use the terms anglophone and francophone for people who speak English or French, respectively, in order to emphasize the fact that not all French speakers are French. We also often refer to both the Francophonie and the francophonie. The nuance is important. Francophonie with a capital F is the fifty-three-member Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (International Organization of the Francophonie), whose purpose it is to promote French. The small-f francophonie is the real planet of francophones. Countries such as Israel and Algeria, and the United States—where 1.6 million speakers make French the third language after English and Spanish—are not part of the capital-F Francophonie (see table 6 in Appendix). In 127 countries of the world, mostly outside the (official) Francophonie, there are tens of millions of students, adults and children, learning French in one of the world’s roughly 1,500 Alliances françaises and French lycées and collèges. An additional twenty million students are learning French in national education programs outside the fifty-three member countries (plus ten observers) of the Francophonie.
Not a bad performance for a language that ranks ninth in the world for number of speakers! And education is just one of the ways in which French has held on to its rank as the world’s second international language. This is the story of how French became a global language, and why it will likely remain one for many years to come.
Part One ~
Origins
Chapter 1 ~
The Romance of French
Very few people know that French has its place in the world not in spite of English, but because of it. We began to think about this when we were at university, back in the days when the Berlin Wall was falling. Jean-Benoît arrived at McGill University speaking a kind of abstract English that was much more formal than the language the anglophones around him were using, especially in casual conversation. Fellow students usually knew what was meant when he mentioned that he was “perturbed” by a sore ankle or had “abandoned” his plan to travel to Africa. But off campus, such stiff language produced blank stares. Julie often served as an interpreter, explaining that Jean-Benoît’s ankle was bothering him and that he had given up his travel plans.
Jean-Benoît’s sophisticated English was normal for a French speaker. French is the Latin of anglophones. Nearly half of the commonly used words in English—for example, chase, catch, surf, challenge and staunch—are of French origin. And while their French origins have been largely forgotten by the majority of English speakers (who tend to believe the words come straight from Latin), the influence of French has remained in their linguistic subconscious. For the most part, so-called Latinate words in English are used only in formal speech: People will say “commence” or “inaugurate” instead of “begin” or “start.”
English is in fact the most Latin, and the most French, among Germanic languages, while French—for reasons that we will see—is the most Germanic among Latin languages. The French and English languages share a symbiotic relationship, and that should come as no surprise, as their histories have been inextricably linked for the past ten centuries. And that connection resulted from events that took place in the ten centuries before that. Few anglophones realize that by keeping French words in the “upper stratum” of their discourse, they are granting French a lofty position in their language and culture. As they export English all around the world, French and its high status have become part of the package. It’s one of the least-known explanations for the resilience of French today.
It is impossible to say exactly when French began. Linguists who study European languages spoken before the second millennium consider themselves lucky to recover sentences, known words or even fragments of written text. In most cases they reconstruct ancient languages by examining how they influenced more recent ones. Historians know more about what happened in France between 400 and 1000 CE than they know about the languages spoken there during that period. The most that can be said is that before French there were many Romance languages; before that there was Gallo-Roman; before that there was Latin, and before that, Gaulish. Three main events pushed the language from one phase to the next: the fall of the Roman Empire, the conquest of England and the rise of Paris as a centre of power.
Before the Romans arrived in what is today the northern half of France, its inhabitants spoke different Celtic languages. They were the descendants of tribes of Indo-Europeans who may have originated in Kazakhstan and who migrated to northern Europe during the third millennium BCE. The tongue of the Celts, like Latin or Gaelic, belongs to the family of Indo-European languages, which also includes Greek and Hindi. The term was coined in 1787 by William Jones, a British Orientalist. He was puzzled by the fact that basic words such as papa and mama are remarkably similar in Greek, Latin, German, English, Sanskrit and Celtic, and he came up with the theory that most European languages were derived from a forgotten original tongue, which he called Indo-European.
The first Celts arrived with their Indo-European tongue in what is today northern France sometime during the first millennium BCE. In the south of France, long before the Celts arrived, the Greeks had established a
colony in Marseilles among the Ligurian people living there. But it was the Celts, not the Greeks, who spread across what is now France, pushing other inhabitants such as the Basques into remote corners of the territory. (Linguists describe the Basque language, which is still spoken in southern France and Spain, as pre–Indo-European. It is regarded as Europe’s oldest language.)
The Celts had barely met up with the Greeks in the south of France when the Romans entered the region in the second century BCE. By then Gaul had somewhere between ten million and fifteen million inhabitants, prosperous and innovative farmers and stockbreeders who had invented the threshing machine, the plow and the barrel. But the Gauls were also good fighters, which explains why it took Rome a century and a half to subdue them; Julius Caesar finally conquered Gaul around 50 BCE.
Curiously, the Celts of Gaul assimilated quickly into the culture of the Romans and started speaking their language. The Celts of Britannia (Britain), which was conquered by the Romans shortly afterwards, never did assimilate. Historians are still trying to understand this difference. Part of the explanation comes from the fact that prior to the Roman conquest, Gaul was already within the Roman economic sphere of influence. Gauls were already using the Roman sesterce as their currency of reference. When the Roman victors showed up with a new system of administration based on cities, a seductive urban culture, unparalleled building techniques and a complete and unified writing system, the Gauls saw the advantages of Roman culture. It didn’t take long for the Gaulish elite to start speaking Latin.
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