The United Nations takes an admirable initiative to promote languages and one of the ways to do it is to show the importance of learning and using them. The aim of the UN language days is to celebrate multilingualism and cultural diversity. March 20 is International Francophony Day dedicated to the French language, which is one of the Organization’s six official languages others being Arabic, Chinese, English, Russian and Spanish.
As a true Francophile, I am interested and curious about anything and everything French, be it literature, films, fashion, Bizet opera in Paris, wine and cheese tasting in Normandy, or having champagne in Champagne. I do or dream of doing all these things. But, first and foremost, it all starts with language. And it does not end with France.
There are 29 countries which have French as an official language (Belgium, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Canada, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, France, Gabon, Guinea, Haiti, Ivory Coast, Luxembourg, Madagascar, Mali, Monaco, Niger, Rwanda, Senegal, Seychelles, Switzerland, Togo, and Vanuatu). English is the only language with official status in more countries, and there are 54 of them. Approximately 300 million people speak French around the world and Africa is the home continent to 50% of French speakers in addition to many Africans who speak French as a second language.
French descended from Latin* spoken in the Roman Empire alongside the other Romance languages such as Portuguese and Spanish and is more than a thousand years old. It became the official language of France in 1539.
French, together with English, are the only two languages taught in every single country in the world. And the new French government has a serious agenda for supporting the promotion and learning the language even more so. In January, they launched the platform “My Idea for The French Language” for the international francophones and francophiles to share ideas for ways to promote and learn the language. Mr. E. Macron government’s ambitions do not stop there. The President has appointed the French-Maroccan writer Leïla Slimani as “Madame Francophonie” to be the ambassador of the language and to aim to increase the number of francophones to 750 million by 2050.
Indeed, there were times when French had the lead as the world’s lingua franca, and there persists this common myth about French people being somewhat too proud and not willing to learn other languages. Personally, I have encountered many who learn and speak English, for example, and often with an extremely charming accent. As these two languages are quite different in pronunciation, which at times can be challenging both ways, they share however the same alphabet with some minor differences and plenty of same vocabulary**. The French words such as savoir fair, faux pas, carte blanche, and oeuvre are naturally used by English speakers, while French speakers have adopted English words such as le weekend, le casting, mail, un toast in their daily usage. There is even a term for the overuse of English words in French – namely Franglais. It is amusing to stumble across comments made by Marcel Proust in his writings on Anglomania in France and anglicisms (English words) in the daily use back in the late 19th c.
The syntax*** in these two languages is a different story and some humorous in-between translation situations might occur. Once I paid a coffee visit to a French ex-pat who resides in Copenhagen. The spacious apartment was saturated with the coffee smell and lit by the broad smile of the host who was greeting her guests in English. “Welcome home!” we were hearing. It was likely was her literal, spontaneous, word-for-word translation of “Bienvenue chez moi” whilst dropping “moi” at the end. The English greeting, which would sound like “Welcome to my home” and has squeezed “to my” between “welcome” and “home” is unnatural to a French speaker. Anyway, it was honey-sweet, and the nicest welcome one could possibly receive, I thought.
Sincere effort to speak a foreign language, even when it is not perfect, can make a memorable, uplifting, and skill-improving experience for you and those around you: basic language knowledge + a broad smile = a great language and social experience.
*Latin, the language of ancient Rome, appeared on the Italian peninsula in about 1000 BCE. Alongside classical Latin, a spoken vernacular version developed, which spread with the Roman army conquering new lands and thus expanding the empire. France was then Gaul, where people spoke Celtic (Gaulish) and Germanic (Frankish) languages. Julius Caesar took over Gaul in the first century BCE, introduced Latin to locals; it stayed and later developed into lingua romana rustica and today’s French language.
** French has had some great influence on the English vocabulary. There were a couple of waves of French language influence on English. It began with Normandy’s Viking chief William the Conqueror who sieged England in 1066 and the country’s society became bilingual, the upper class spoke French and the peasants spoke English. Written languages were French and Latin. A lot of French loan words poured into English in 1200-1300 due to the high cultural prestige the French language had. Later influences were seen after 1500. Even to this day, the English Finance Minister is called after the French Chancellor of the Exchequer.
***Syntax – word order in a sentence, a structure of a sentence.
Sources: Wikipedia; UN; Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs, France Diplomacy; Le Figaro -14 janvier 2018; Gaston Dorren “Lingo”, Kristin Bech “Fra englisc til English”
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