Château François 1er, in Villers-Cotterêts, France
For some time now, we have seen this as English’s moment. Greek had its turn, as did Latin and French, to be the so-called lingua franca, or global language. When I lived and taught abroad this past spring, I urged my students to keep trying their French, even when shop owners responded in English; but pretty much every nonnative speaker I met agreed that English is now an essential skill for anyone working in business or the sciences or with the public. As Marcus Schulzke of the University of Leeds summed things up recently, “The popularity of English as a second language, as well the ubiquity of English in business, science, mass media, and other fields, indicates that English will increasingly become the world language over the next century.”
But among the problems Schulzke lists within this development are “whether global English will suppress non-English-speaking cultures, whether it will unfairly disadvantage those who learn English as a second language, and whether English’s dominance will be considered legitimate by nonnative speakers.” Chiefly, Schulzke argues, “There is a serious risk that the benefits of global English will be realized unevenly, benefiting those in core English-speaking countries more than nonnative speakers.”
Enter the pre-Brexit Emmanuel Macron, who has awarded €200 million (about $235 million) to refurbish a castle in Villers-Cotterêts, northeast of Paris, as a global center for the promotion and study of French. The French president has called the domination of English at the EU headquarters in Brussels “not inevitable,” and he should know — for centuries French was the language of Western diplomacy, and before 2004, it was arguably dominant for the European Union. Now it’s the sixth-most-spoken language in our increasingly connected world, with Mandarin, English, Hindi, Spanish, and Arabic ahead of it in sheer numbers of speakers. With fewer countries for which English is the official language in the bloc, why shouldn’t the members of the EU choose a tongue that belongs to one of them? And why shouldn’t that tongue be French, which is after all an old hand at being a lingua franca? The European Court of Justice defaults to French; why shouldn’t other Continental dealings?
The answer is purely practical, as the French CEO of the international PR firm Burston-Marsteller pointed out in response to Macron’s call for boosting French internationally. Not only do more than half the citizens of the EU speak English as a first or second language — a statistic that cannot be claimed by another European language, however fluently it is spoken at home — but also 90 percent of schoolchildren in Europe are studying English as a second language. This is sort of like forms of voting that give the nod to the candidate who ranks either first or second for 51 percent of voters, as opposed to the candidate who racks up 13 percent of first-choice votes (France’s percentage of the EU population) but can claim only 24 percent of first- and second-place votes. In fact, if we were going solely by the percentage of the EU population, German would get the nod — a development that, as any German-speaking traveler to Eastern Europe can attest, would rouse the ire of several countries for whom the Second World War is not a distant memory.
OK, so French may be celebrated, but it’s not about to win the struggle for global language dominance. More interesting are the difficulties Macron began having even before his announcement of his project. Turning toward Francophone African countries last year, he called on young Africans to promote the language and help turn it into “the No. 1 language in Africa and maybe even the world.” Given that French began its linguistic inroads on that continent because of the inroads made — often brutally — by French colonists, not everyone thought expanding French was the natural purview of native Congolese or Cameroonians.
The same has been said, not unjustifiably, of English. And if the French were to have any success with their language-expansion project, they could run into two other thorny issues familiar to people who study the growing hegemony of English. The first is so-called corruption. The French are famous for tossing out foreign words and phrases they don’t like; the Académie française recently rejected words like le buzz and fashionista. But English, as a lingua franca, has had to adapt to the influence of widespread nonnative use. As Schulzke observes, “Those who speak Standard English are in an ever weaker position to use it as a means of exclusion, or to dictate the methods of English language education. … Multiple Englishes [are] challenging the standard language ideology that attacks the legitimacy of nonstandard varieties of English.”
The second and even more interesting challenge is the much-debated question of language neutrality. Macron quite deliberately names French as a “language of freedom” and sees the diffusion of it as carrying French “values” around the world. While many see English similarly, there are robust arguments for English as a so-called neutral language. Because its recent, rapid spread has been the peaceful result of travel, immigration, and the opportunities the language provides for social and economic mobility, English purportedly lacks the baggage associated with, say, Spanish (“conquistador Catholicism”), Chinese (Maoism), or Arabic (Islam). This neutrality, if it exists, is a good thing for a global language (and thus doesn’t bode well for France’s bid). If it doesn’t exist, though — if English is more like French in its association with past colonialism, repression, or imposition of values — then Schulzke’s remarks on what global English provokes would surely apply to global French. He asks, for instance, how “the power asymmetries reinforced by English use or the political ideologies associated with English” will be transformed by the huge number of nonnative speakers. Might “the power asymmetries created by English language dominance … be renegotiated and restructured in more inclusive ways”? And if these questions are worth applying to English, I ask you, distinguished members of the Académie française, what will happen to those French values when its new speakers start renegotiating?