[lg policy] Macron's global ambitions for the French language will fail

[Harold Schiffman]

https://www.ft.com/content/82290250-db5b-11e7-a039-c64b1c09b482

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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 Read next A Year in a Word: Quite Women of the Empire: the
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Save to myFT December 12, 2017 118 “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.
michael.skapinker at ft.com Twitter: @Skapinker

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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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