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<br><br>Macron’s global ambitions for the French language will fail
The president has an agenda to revive his native tongue as a lingua franca
Michael Skapinker
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December 12, 2017
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“French will be the number one language in Africa and maybe even the world if we play our cards right in the coming decades.” So said Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, in a recent speech in Burkina Faso.
It is a long-held French fantasy: that the language can somehow match, or even overtake, English as the world’s preferred tongue — and Mr Macron thinks he knows how to achieve it.
He sees a coming demographic dividend for French. Seventy per cent of Africans are under 30, and the continent’s population growth will be explosive. The number who, for colonial reasons, speak French will balloon.
The number who speak English will balloon too, but Mr Macron has a host of plans to make French more attractive: student exchanges, museum partnerships, French volunteers working in African businesses, a Maison de la Jeunesse in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso’s capital, which will host researchers and start-ups.
His ambition to make French a global language will fail, of course. For one thing, it does not take account of history. If all that it took to make a language a global lingua franca was government determination, French would have outstripped English a century ago.
In colonial times, the French were desperate to impose their language on their empire. As one historian of the French in Africa, quoted in Nkonko Kamwangamalu’s book Language Policy and Economics: The Language Question in Africa, said of France’s colonial policy: “It has always been a cardinal belief of Frenchmen that there is only one valid culture in the world; that it is their duty to lead all men towards it.” In French colonial schools, children learnt French.
The pressure to learn English always came from below: from parents who saw that the language was the way for their children to get ahead
The British, for the most part, could not have cared less what language colonial subjects spoke. Educational provision in the British empire was fitful. When imperial civil servants did offer schooling in English, they often concluded that it was a bad idea because it gave the colonised ambitions above their station.
In his book English and the Discourses of Colonialism, Alastair Pennycook recounts an inspector of schools in colonial Malaya saying: “As pupils who acquire a knowledge of English are invariably unwilling to earn their livelihood by manual labour, the immediate result of affording an English education to any large number of Malays would be the creation of a discontented class.”
British policy generally took the view that the only local people who needed to speak English were a small elite to staff the local civil service, what the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay called “a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions we govern”.
Education in the British empire was largely left to missionaries, who usually thought the most effective way of getting the word across was in the local language. Only the few students who reached the rarefied heights of secondary or university education were taught in English.
The pressure to learn English came from below: from parents who saw that the language was the way for their children to get ahead. In the 19th century, local leaders set up institutions such as the Hindu College in colonial Calcutta to provide an education in English and to cater for the most ambitious parents — the kind who, from Chile to China, still make sure that their children learn English.
They do not do it because the UK government encourages them to, although the British Council is today a leading provider of English lessons. They do it because English is the modern language of success. And that happened because the British empire was succeeded as global leader by its most successful colony, the US, which, after the second world war, dominated international business with multinational giants from Boeing to Google.
People choose a language for the same reason bank robbers rob banks: because that is where the money is. There may be people who learn French to take up Mr Macron’s offer of the chance to study in France. But there will be many more who learn English, not only to gain valuable qualifications in the US, the UK or Australia, but also in the Netherlands, Germany and China, where an increasing number of universities offer courses in English.
When Mr Macron’s Maison de la Jeunesse in Burkina Faso opens, there will, I suspect, be plenty of people coming in to use its computers to brush up on their English.
<a href="mailto:michael.skapinker@ft.com">michael.skapinker@ft.com</a>
Twitter: @Skapinker<br clear="all"><br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature">=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+<br><br> Harold F. Schiffman<br><br>Professor Emeritus of <br> Dravidian Linguistics and Culture <br>Dept. of South Asia Studies <br>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305<br><br>Phone: (215) 898-7475<br>Fax: (215) 573-2138 <br><br>Email: <a href="mailto:haroldfs@gmail.com" target="_blank">haroldfs@gmail.com</a><br><a href="http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/" target="_blank">http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/</a> <br><br>-------------------------------------------------</div>
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