French abandon ‘war’ against ‘Franglais’

Press, 8 February 1980, Page 10

French abandon ‘war’ against ‘Franglais’

From the ‘Economist,’ ‘Loridon

After a’long struggle, the French seem to have abandoned their efforts to stem, the rising tide of the English language. That may be hard to believe for anyone who has seen the French sticking to their linguistic guns at international conferences; but the order to retreat bears' the Government’s official stamp. France’s fallback aim is to make sure that:-if French cannot be number one, it must be. undisputed number: tWO.. ■■■■.

The Government has quietly endorsed a plan which calls for an end' to the competition with English. Its author, Mr Jacques Rigaud, a top civil servant (who was recently named head of Radio Luxemburg), felt the French were being unrealistic to pursue the old rivalry. His report, approved by senior Cabinet Ministers recently, recognised that, compared with English, French has come to look old-fashioned.

The new challenge, he said, was not to beat English, but to give French culture its own modern appeal. In the eyes of outsiders, it had lapsed into a decorative, academic role (partly because the French had deprived it of fruitful interplay with other languages by their sublime indifference to all cultures save'their own). .

The Rigaud plan shifts the onus for spreading French abroad from the willing shoulders of classical theatre

troupes td 'those of French^ 1 - businessmen, engineers arid/ media 1 representatives'. ’ ' It.is riot a question of .sur-’. render. The language of Voltaire has simply been overrun. Gallic wordsmiths labouring to find equivalents for new Anglo-Saxon words have retired hurt, beaten by the speed of technological innovation and trampled by insidious “franglais.” In the early’ 19705. /the Government appointed by President Georges Pompidous began issuing cumbersome official translations ‘ for new Anglo-Saxon financial, ’* administrative and defence terms. Anyone employed by the State was bound by decree to use them. All that has stopped. The ingenuity of the translators had its limits, and so did public tolerance of their. inventions; : •;

“Le “le management” and “le'hardware” are firmly entrenched. In •many other areas,: • notably “le show business,” the combination :of , British perfidy and the American bulldozer has been linguistically over- ' powering. And despite the official policy of widening the range of foreign languages studied in French secondary schools, more than four out of five French children as a matter of course .plump for English as their first, foreign lan- : P r eslden t Giscard d’Estaing-has been publicly brooding about the prospect that-by trie year 2000 only 1

- : ;perecerit-of the world’s population. will be French citiz zehs. His' chief concern /Seems to be to maintain France’s cultural clout. Even now the French language can consider itself lucky to be ranked number two in the world. Going by the number of people who use it as their mother tongue, it ranks only' twelfth. A study published by the Paris newspaper “Le Monde” showed that of the 270 M people around the world classed as" francophone, only 90M actually speak French.Among the so-called’ international languages, French thus trails English (350 M Spanish (200 M Arabic (120 M and Portuguese (115 M Still, French retains great prestige. It may not quite fit into a chips-with-everything world, but it is logical, clear and attractive. A third of the delegates at the United Nations rely on it to express their views. In the light of the Rigaud report, the French Foreign .Ministry has now taken on the task of supporting the use of French at a realistic level. It will dig in as second language in Europe, Latin America, and part of the East. ./ But there will be no heroic last stands. Far better, says Mr Jean Francois-Pon-cet. the Foreign Minister, for a French book to be read in Indonesian than to be distributed in French in Indonesia and'ignored.