The Decline and Fall of the French Language

Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission, a French-speaker from the little tax haven of Luxembourg, is bitter about Britain’s departure from the European Union. He has taken to giving public speeches to multi-national audiences in French rather than English and has declared that “English is losing its importance in Europe”. Yet the irony is that even with Britain leaving, the EU will continue to depend utterly on the English language because it is the only language that most of its nations have in common. If an Estonian wants to talk to a Portuguese or a Greek to a Dutchman, what other language could they possibly use? About half of the people of Europe have at least some basic knowledge of English as a second language and many of the educated have a good command of it. Very few have a different second language. In 1997 half the EU documents were in English and about 40 per cent in French; by 2009 three-quarters were in English and only 10 per cent in French. The predominance of English has nothing to do with whether or not Britain is a member of the EU. Quite simply, English is not just a but the world language, and French is in irreversible decline.

English is spoken throughout the world and has a firm base in almost every continent: Britain and Ireland in Europe, the United States and Canada, South Africa and Nigeria, India and Singapore and of course Australia and New Zealand. India is the one coming up fast for among its billion people it has more speakers of English as their first language than there are in England; many crores more have at least some knowledge of English—often a good one, which is why India is call centre to the world. If anyone outside the Anglosphere is considering learning a foreign language, a Japanese or a Bolivian or an Omani, guess which one they will choose? It is not going to be French.

English is the language of commerce and economics, of science and engineering, of aviation, of everything that makes the modern world work. When the last economic crisis hit the European Union and the finance ministers had to meet an urgent deadline, they all dispensed with their interpreters and spoke English to each other. The same is true of science. Today scientific journals in northern Europe, including Germany, are published in English. There was a time when science students in Britain used to learn German to keep up with the latest research, but after the Germans drove their great Jewish scientists into English-speaking exile, the idea of needing to learn German rather lost its point. Even a French scientist will try to publish in English, for he does not want to lose the priority for his work by letting his research findings languish in the obscurity of French, a language no one reads. It goes back a long way. When the Nobel prize-winning French physicist Louis de Broglie, the seventh Duc de Broglie, was asked in the 1920s by one of his more knowledgeable relatives to explain the latest findings in his field, he began by saying, “In order to make myself clear, I will have to speak in English.”

French remains in use only in a few fragments of the former French colonial empire and even there it is receding. Where French remains in use, it is merely a piece of cultural imperialism imposed on the very poorest African countries, which have no resources with which to trade in the world’s markets and so depend on handouts from Paris, the price of which is speaking French. In Algeria many are switching from French to English, but then English has fewer bad memories for them.

When I went to Vietnam, once a French colony, I used English exclusively, even though I could speak French reasonably fluently. The only time I have spoken French to a Vietnamese was in communist Czechoslovakia in the 1980s, where the Vietnamese were working as slave labour on building sites to pay for the armaments the Czechs had sent their country during the Vietnam War. We spoke about their living conditions in French because we knew that any Czechs listening in would not have a clue what we were talking about. In India I speak to my wife in French for the same reason. In the course of the twentieth century French went rapidly from worldwide use to being a private language. I have often had to rescue French-speaking tourists, utterly lost in the new English-speaking world, not just in Nevada but in Yunnan and Poland. They are unable to come to terms with the fact that it is now necessary to speak English everywhere and it is only undeserved luck if a native speaker of English who knows some French turns up to help them out and interpret.

It is a puzzle as to why French has survived at all outside its minor country of origin. One reason is that apart from its uncouth nasal sounds, which remind one of Donald Duck in a temper, it is relatively easy for English speakers to learn. It is much less daunting than the language we all need, Mandarin. Education departments support the teaching of French because it is cheap and the rusty old machinery for instructing pupils in it is in place. Everyone in Australia, as in Britain, knows the urgency of teaching and learning Mandarin, but little is done about it. Britain has failed to do so because the present foreign-language teaching establishment blocks any eastward switch away from French. These apologists often fall back on talking about French as the language of civilisation. They do not want to be out of a job. The Chinese had a sophisticated literate civilisation at a time when the French were tribal savages being decimated by Caesar’s legions.

In any case the French have long ceased to produce anything worth reading. We are no longer living in the epoch of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), perhaps the greatest novel ever written. There is no longer any clarity in French thinking, for it has given way to postmodern gibberish that fails to connect with the real world. Paradoxically, it is because French “intellectuals” overestimate the importance of language and place more much emphasis on idiosyncratic linguistic quirks than on the need to link different aspects of the material world in a rational way.

The main reason for the continued international resistance of French is snobbery. In the nineteenth century it was the language spoken by Russian aristocrats to set themselves apart from their serfs, which is why it turns up in Russian novels. Even after the French Revolution French was the language in which aristocrats from one country spoke to those from another. It remained the language of diplomacy until the time of the Conservative British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, who was not an aristocrat, had little French, and insisted on speaking English at an international conference. When the League of Nations was founded after the First World War, the French had to settle for a bilingual institution, French being reduced to parity with English. Today the French have to plead with and harangue the leading figures in the United Nations to get French used at all.

The last of the aristocratic French tradition lives on today only in the talk of wine snobs and on the menus of expensive restaurants. French wines are losing out worldwide to Australian ones with demotic names such as The Shy Pig, on whose label the key feature is a little pig’s behind, which is all you can see of porky as he tries to hide behind a pile of wine barrels. “Pig’s arse” used to be a colloquialism for expressing disbelief. The French are livid and despondent at the competition and will be even more so when decent Aussie tucker appears on menus throughout the world without a word of French. There is no place for French in a truly democratic age.

Faced with the decline of their language, the French have responded by building a Maginot Line around it. The Académie Française, the official guardian of the French language, which in 1992 began but has not yet completed an authoritative dictionary of the French language, has at last discovered the internet. They have constructed a website with a section divided into dire (what to say) and ne pas dire (what not to say). It is all pretty dire. Most of the words that they are seeking to exclude originated in English. In future there will no longer be any le fairplay in France and even le bingedrinking will have to go. E-mail is to be replaced by courriel. Long-forgotten words from the Ancien Régime are to be dusted down and thrust upon bemused French children, and ugly neologisms with Frankish roots will provide further bafflement. The return of the obsolete and the invention of the ugly; how very French.

The glory of English lies in its hybrid nature, part Anglo-Saxon and part Norman French, and in its willingness to import useful words from all other languages, such as bungalow from Hindi, samizdat from Russian, eisteddfod from Welsh and, of course, sombrero, blitzkrieg, shikker and soixante-neuf. Plus there is a constant exchange of words between the English-speaking countries so that a Pom will unselfconsciously speak of chundering and sledging. A word of the future coming from India is chumcha (literally a spoon), which describes a petty official who is forced to scrape and stir on behalf of his masters, rigidly instructed and directed from above. If you dig your musty old French dictionary out of the attic, you will find in the English section three times as many words as there are in French. The French section is a mere appendix to an English tome. English makes for difficult spelling but for a wonderful richness of sounds and vocabulary. It is very easy for foreigners to learn basic English because it is an almost grammar-less language, but beyond the easy start lies an incomparable wealth of idiom and allusion that still has to be mastered, something the French cannot match.

The decline of the French language mirrors the fate of its mother country. The military supremacy of France ended at Waterloo and French weakness was again revealed when the Prussians rolled over them in 1870-71. The occupation of France by the Germans in the Second World War was the final humiliation, and ever since the French have hated the English-speaking nations for having come to their rescue. Total defeat at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam in 1954 and the clumsy sinking of the Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand were the final marks of failure.

The French have ceased to have the power to impose their language on anyone other than the very weak and poor and the mediocre performance of their economy means that there is no material incentive for anyone to learn French. Today more people in the world speak Portuguese than French. Still Mr Juncker loves speaking French, the snob language of a country where the indigenous language is Letzeburgesch; in Luxembourg the laws are drafted in French but disseminated in German so that ordinary folk can work out what has been imposed on them. No wonder Jean-Claude loves the EU.