English rocks French
Dennis Baron
debaron at uiuc.edu
Fri Apr 18 22:10:31 UTC 2008
There's a new post on the Web of Language:
English rocks French
The French government spends millions of Euros every year to promote
French and discourage English in every corner of French life. And
French Président Nicolas Sarkozy is one of the French language’s
biggest fans, when he isn't being distracted by his new bride, the
Italian singer/songwriter/model Carla Bruni.
But apparently the government-run television network France 3 didn’t
get the memo calling for all French, all the time, and so five weeks
ago it selected an English-language song, Sébastien Tellier’s
“Divine,” to represent the nation in the annual Eurovision song contest.
Sarko’s Minister of Culture, Christine Albanel, who is responsible
for ensuring that French TV complies with France’s national language
policy, confessed this week that she had no idea that France 3 had
done such an unpatriotic thing. Perhaps she didn’t get the memo
either. . . . When the news of the latest French capitulation to the
English juggernaut (a Hindi word meaning 'juggernaut') came to light,
the response was predictable: an uproar in Parliament and a protest
from Marc Favre d'Echallens, director of the organization Defense of
the French Language,
read the rest on The Web of Language
www.uiuc.edu/goto/weboflanguage
Dennis Baron
Professor of English and Linguistics
Department of English
University of Illinois
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801
office: 217-244-0568
fax: 217-333-4321
www.uiuc.edu/goto/debaron
read the Web of Language:
www.uiuc.edu/goto/weboflanguage
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lgpolicy-list/attachments/20080418/ba962e2a/attachment.htm>
More information about the Lgpolicy-list
mailing list