{"id":37811,"date":"2013-05-31T14:16:11","date_gmt":"2013-05-31T13:16:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/the-language-wars-of-france-2\/37811\/"},"modified":"2013-05-31T14:16:11","modified_gmt":"2013-05-31T13:16:11","slug":"the-language-wars-of-france-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/the-language-wars-of-france-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Language Wars of France"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paris.<\/em><\/p>\n

A\u00a0single market, a single currency, a single language? The doors and bridges shown on Euro notes already reflect the fluid nature of deals between businessmen with no home and no history. So should students be free to cross borders, using English as a passport valid everywhere (especially in French universities), with no need for dictionaries?<\/p>\n

We are told that French universities, like the rest of France, are \u201cbemused\u201d: the people in them still speak French\u2026 The minister for higher education and research, Genevi\u00c3\u00a8ve Fioraso, wants to get rid of this language barrier that discourages \u201cstudents from emerging countries \u2013 Korea, India, Brazil\u201d from coming to France.<\/p>\n

Yet the language of Moli\u00c3\u00a8re is officially spoken in 29\u00a0countries (the language of Shakespeare in\u00a056). And the number of French speakers is steadily increasing, especially in Africa. But France does not want African students, to judge by the obstacle course it imposes on them: they are not rich enough, not prepared to pay the (substantial) fees charged by commercial colleges or engineering schools. In US universities, where the proportion of foreign students (3.7%) is much lower than in France (13%), there has been no attempt to make up the deficit by teaching in Chinese or Portuguese. But Fioraso claims, slightly ironically: \u201cIf we do not allow courses to be conducted in English, we shall be left with five people sitting round a table discussing Proust\u201d. Before Fioraso, Nicolas Sarkozy made clear his contempt for the humanities by pitying students who were forced to read Madame de La Fayette\u2019s novel La Princesse de Cl\u00c3\u00a8ves<\/em> instead of studying law or business.<\/p>\n

The 1994 Toubon law provides that \u201cthe language of instruction, examinations and competitive examinations, as well as theses and dissertations in state and private educational establishments, shall be French.\u201d A few eminent academics object to this 20th-century provision on the ground that if we defend multilingualism (still very much alive in most international organisations in the 21st century), it will deter English-speakers from studying in Paris\u00a0(1<\/a>).<\/p>\n

But the attractiveness of a language is not just about the sale of higher education to \u201cemerging\u201d countries. It is the product of a manner of communication, of thinking about the world now and the world to come. France has struggled to defend its cinema and songs: must it accept that research and science will be one day be conducted exclusively in the (often mangled) language of the current superpower?<\/p>\n

The linguist Claude Hag\u00c3\u00a8ge says that \u201cthe paradox is that today the people who are responsible for Americanisation and the promotion of English are not American.\u201d Fortunately, people who are not French (notably in Africa and Quebec) have enabled cultural diversity to flourish. Political leaders should be inspired by their tenacity, not by the foolish fatalism of a few academics.<\/p>\n

SERGE HALIMI<\/strong>\u00a0is director of Le Monde Diplomatique. He has written several books, including one on the French press, Les nouveaux chiens de garde and another on the French left in the 20th century \u2014 Quand la gauche essayait \u2014 both are fine works. He can be reached at\u00a0Serge.Halimi@monde-diplomatique.fr<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This article appears in the excellent Le Monde Diplomatique, whose English language edition can be found at\u00a0mondediplo.com.<\/a>\u00a0This full text appears by agreement with Le Monde Diplomatique. CounterPunch features two or three articles from LMD every month.<\/em><\/p>\n

This article originally appeared on: Counterpunch<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Paris. A\u00a0single market, a single currency, a single language? The doors and bridges shown on Euro notes already reflect the fluid nature of deals between businessmen with no home and no history. So should students be free to cross borders, using English as a passport valid everywhere (especially in French universities), with no need for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-37811","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37811","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37811\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}