Giving in to the scourge of English.

last updated 8 January 2015

France

Paul-Marie Coûteaux

The French language is eroding, said Paul-Marie Coûteaux in Paris’ Le Figaro. And the much-ballyhooed Francophone alliance of French-speaking countries is doing little to stop the decline. La Francophonie, which meets this week in Romania, is increasingly concerned with humanitarian issues rather than language issues. Yet it is “practically a lie to speak of a Francophone community when France itself is slowly turning bilingual.” The old call to “linguistic resistance” is meaningless in a country where children are taught English in elementary school, before they have mastered their mother tongue, and where many university courses are taught only in English. Even in the European Union, which was supposed to be a bastion of linguistic diversity, “the only working language for most agencies is a vague Anglo-technocratese, incomprehensible to most mortals.” France has tried to position itself as a leader of global resistance to Americanization. We could start by resisting with our words. If we fail, mastery of French will one day be merely a “means of showing off.”