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?
In America, French owes its survival to the complicated geopolitics of the second half of the eighteenth century and, now, to the cultural fortitude of Quebec and Acadia. What will happen if the proportion of francophone Canadians slips to twenty percent? And what if Quebec separates from Canada? What will happen to francophones in other parts of Canada? They may indeed assimilate quickly, like the Franco-Americans and the Cajuns of yesterday. On the other hand, other French-speaking communities on the continent may bolster them. French is now an official language in New Brunswick, and who could have predicted that the number of native French speakers would be rising in California and in Florida, a state that is attracting both Haitians and Quebec “snowbirds”—many of whom are counted in census statistics?
Africa forms the biggest pool of French speakers and has the most potential for growth in the francophonie. If birth rate alone is considered, the number of francophones could potentially double in twenty-five years. In North Africa, French is doing well everywhere, but much depends on whether the sub-Saharan countries can improve their education systems and economies. As a French teacher from Togo told us, “Le français ne fait plus vivre son homme” (“French no longer provides a living”). Only twenty-five percent of Africans are fully schooled, and this proportion is dropping every year, but—a promising change—the proportion of women among those who are fully schooled is rising rapidly. This could reinforce French in African households and eventually make it a mother tongue rather than a learned language. In Mauritius an unexpected turn of events is shaking up the anglophone elite: Most of the Creole population is now schooling itself in French universities in Réunion, and eighty percent of the newspapers are now in French. This rising class of francophones nurtures the ambition of making Mauritus the Hong Kong of the Indian Ocean.
Although much of the future of French depends on what happens in Africa, the language is vulnerable to the vagaries of France’s foreign policy there. Any move by the French has the potential to attract or alienate people. One Senegalese author, Boubacar Boris Diop, stopped writing in French and turned to his Wolof mother tongue as a result of France’s shady actions in Rwanda. The gesture, though symbolic, is an isolated one for the moment, but it could catch on. More seriously, French made progress in post-colonial Africa because it was perceived as the language of development; as the continent continues to stagnate and even regress, will French still be considered useful? It’s hard to predict.
The fringes of the French-speaking world are equally interesting. More French is spoken in Israel than in Louisiana (in both percentage and number of speakers), and Israel could well join the Francophonie if it manages to bury the hatchet with Lebanon (which opposes Israel’s candidacy). French is spoken more in the United States and in Mexico than it is in some member countries of the official Francophonie, namely Bulgaria or Albania. Who knows where that will lead? Enrolment in programs of the Alliances françaises and French collèges and lycées is increasing. And the inroads made by the Agence universitaire francophone in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia show there is still interest in the language there.
In the end, the future of French will depend on a simple question: How useful will French be to its native speakers, partial speakers and francophiles? Very few people ever learn a language just because it is beautiful. People will continue to learn and maintain French only if it provides them with access to things that are useful, productive, challenging or beautiful. That is why this book has focused on the decisions and policies, creations and inventions, achievements and failures that have shaped the destiny of French, as opposed to strictly linguistics.
Statistics show that the use of French in international organizations puts it on a second tier all of its own, well below English, but well above all other international languages in terms of use and learning. Fatalists view this placement not as a tier but as the first step towards free fall. But global statistics on the teaching of French as a second language indicate that French remains solidly established as the other global language.
The future of French also depends on individual efforts and initiatives in research, in business, in arts and culture. Business, science and diplomacy have to be carried out in French if it is to remain a language of science, business and diplomacy. At the moment, the elites of many countries are still turning to French because it is the best way to access knowledge, science and business. In some areas of excellence French remains not only useful but necessary, namely mathematics, biology, biomedical research, oceanography and nuclear research. The threat to French right now is not so much English as the mediocrity of the French university system and of the French press in general (French dailies have very low circulation). However, these things are due more to policy decisions than to lack of cultural dynamism, and are reversible.
In diplomacy, the Francophonie’s push for plurilingualism and cultural diversity may reap very big rewards. These policies may well be what francophone countries need in order to create a vast economy of culture, but also to become a model themselves. In the Renaissance, people learned Italian because Italian cities were centres of cultural and scientific renewal, not because they were powerful. In the twenty-first century, many people could turn to French because the Francophonie represents the most articulate and progressive alternative to the global American village.
For all we know, French could outlast English. Pop historians of the English language never fail to draw parallels between the triumphant destiny of English and that of Latin during the Roman Empire. But they rarely point out that Roman patricians spoke Latin with a Greek accent, primarily because the Romans looked to the Greeks for culture, knowledge and education; their children were schooled by Greek instructors. And as the western Roman Empire collapsed, only the eastern, Greek-speaking side remained, and Byzantium outlived the Roman Empire by another eight centuries.
The question that motivated this book was why French has maintained its influence in spite of the domination of English. But many linguists point out that the position of English is not as solid as it appears. According to linguist David Graddol, who did two studies of English for the British Council, English may well be the world’s lingua franca, but native anglophones may end up being victims of their language’s success. As more of the world speaks English, monolingual English speakers may lose their competitive edge to English speakers who also master other languages, particularly since, as Graddol argues, the more people speak English, the less relevant the norms and standards of the language will become. The belief that English is the language of business, science and diplomacy has been beneficial for English to a point, but it has come at a price: that of making Anglo-American scientists, businessmen and diplomats oblivious to the fact that good science, business and diplomacy are also being conducted in other languages. It can be lonely at the top, and ivory towers are brittle. Linguist Jean Michel Eloy jokes that the best language for business is the language of the client, and this may not do English any favours in the future. Who remembers that nobody at the U.S. embassy in Iran in 1979 spoke Farsi—at the very moment of the Iranian revolution? The language of the client….
The story of French has been, and will continue to be, one of living dangerously. Spoken on many continents by relatively few people, the language is spread much thinner than Spanish, Arabic or Portuguese, but distributed more widely. Outside of France, only minorities speak French. More often than not, only the elite master the language, and the bulk of the population is only partly French-speaking at best. This can be viewed as a sign of decadence or as a starting point. Outside of France, Belgium, Switzerland and North America, French is learned as a second language rather than a mother tongue, and most of the French-speaking elites are in fact bilingual, if not multilingual. Because of this precarious situation, French could be wiped out within several generations. But it also could mean that French is in a better position to reach out and spread its influence almost everywhere on the planet.
This linguistic archipelago, this Polynesia of French, is a return to the situation of French five centuries ago, when only fringe groups of urbanites and lettrés spoke the language. The pessimistic see this as a sign of decline. But it could as easily be a condition for French’s renewal, a second youth. Much will depend on whether francophones—including the people of France—are able to capitalize on their situation and summon up some ambition.
All of which is to say, the most fascinating chapters of the story of French have yet to be told.