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France Will Simply Have to Swallow Anglobalization of Common Language
SourceA French group entitled Avenir de la Langue Française (Future of the French Language) has claimed that the invasion of English words poses a greater "threat" to France's national identity than the imposition of German under the Nazis. Writing recently in Le Monde and l'Humanite, the group, supported by eight other patriotic organizations, has called on the Sarkozy government to turn back the English flood. "There are more English words on the walls of Paris," they state, "than German words under the Occupation."
Quite apart from the staggering tastelessness of equating the tongue of their British and French Nato allies with that of their fascist conquerors, how reasonable is their fear? Although President Nicolas Sarkozy speaks almost no English—as I discovered in a torturous conversation with him about the battle of Waterloo—he is accused by these groupings of wanting to make France bilingual.
He has spotted something that must make his Gaullist gut retch —that English has long replaced French as the world's lingua franca—but he had the foresight to try to embrace the fact for France's long-term benefit.
This year, English-speakers celebrate, as French-speakers must bemoan, the bicentenary of the moment when French started to lose its supremacy as the global language. When in October 1810 Marshal Andre Massena's invading Army of Portugal was repulsed from the Lines of Torres Vedras outside Lisbon by the Duke of Wellington, Napoleon's all-conquering juggernaut at last shuddered to a halt. The fightback had begun, and it was to end five years later at Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna, with Britain gaining all the strategic points she needed to build a world empire, and export the English tongue to a fifth of the Earth's surface.
English has became the dominant language of the Internet, air traffic control, computers, international business and by 2030 more Chinese people will be able to speak it than there are Americans. Already by 2001, English was being spoken by more than one in three of the 350 million citizens of the European Union, whereas fewer than one in 10 spoke French outside France itself. Even in those areas where French influence has been strong —Morocco, Algeria, Syria, Vietnam, Cambodia, Chad, and elsewhere—English has encroached very successfully.
English is the official language used by the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, and the only working language of the European Free Trade Association, the Baltic Marine Biologists Association, the Asian Amateur Athletics Association, the African Hockey Federation, while it is the second language of bodies as diverse as the Andean Commission of Jurists and the Arab Air Carriers Organization.
When in 1942 the Japanese premier Tojo called all the puppet governments of the "Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere" together for an anti-Imperialism conference in Tokyo, he found the only language all the delegates could speak was English.
France's traditional response to this linguistic "Anglobalization" has been to attempt a form of legal protectionism against the steamroller tongue of "les rosbifs" and "les Anglo-Saxons". In 1994 the French Assemblée Nationale passed the Loi Toubon, which was signed into law by President François Mitterand. Named after Jacques Toubon, the culture minister, it stipulated that "French shall be the language of instruction, work, trade and exchanges and of the public services.
"The use of French shall be mandatory for the designation, offer, presentation, instructions for use, and description of the scope and conditions of a warranty of goods, products and services as well as bills and receipts. The same provisions apply to any written, spoken, radio and television advertisement" and so on for another 21 highly prescriptive clauses. The law has been used against American and British companies, such as Disney and the Body Shop on the Champs Elysées that had labels in English.
The principle was extended io cyber space, when the French Government asked the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development to take up the issue of regulating language content on the Internet. A lawsuit was even brought against Georgia Institute of Technology by Avenir de la Langue Française on the grounds that the campus Web site in Lorraine was in English, even though the teachers came from Atlanta and all the students had to be fluent in English to enrol for the courses, which were all taught in English.
In 2005, France's Higher Audiovisual Council ordered television channels to translate the titles of popular programs and cartoons into French.
"Popstars" was instructed to become "Vedettes de Variétés", "Star Academy" became "L'Ēcoles des Vedettes", "Funky Cops" was transformed into "Des Flics dans la Vent" and, most unwieldy of all, "Totally Spies" became "Des Espions à Part Entière".
Today, 40% of all pop songs on French radio are supposed to be sung in French, although of course the law is widely flouted.
In two centuries, French may have to be protected as a linguistic curio, like Britain does with Cornish or Manx. Until then, the French must learn to be bilingual, or risk being left behind in the global market-place, gasping outraged complaints in a tongue fewer and fewer people understand.
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Originally Posted by Wulfhere
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