Jacques Chirac appeals to a long history of English amusement at the French. When, in 2006, he stormed out of an EU summit because the (French) leader of a European business lobby addressed attendees in English, it gave the Anglophone world another chance to feel smug in the superiority of their tongue. How ironic that English, brought to every corner of the world by the trading ships of the British Empire and the teleconferences of American business, had become the lingua franca of the 21st century.
Since then, things have got worse for the French. Francophones are increasingly threatened, not just in international organisations where English is an easy mutual method of communication, but also by the infiltration of the language of Shakespeare into that of Molière. The Académie Française can’t be pleased about all the people sending textos or emails (which it insists on calling mél), if they don’t have time for le chat. This worrying trend has even seeped into the corridors of power. Chirac must be seething to find that under a successor derisively called l’Américain, the Higher Education Minister feels happy to defy Gallic loyalty, winning this year’s “prize” for services against French, the Prix de la Carpette Anglaise (think doormat):
Her crime: proclaiming to the press that she had no intention of speaking French when attending European meetings in Brussels, because, she said, it was quite obvious that English was now the easiest mode of communication.
Outside France, where resistance, especially through its “linguistic Commonwealth”, the International Organisation of Francophonie, is strongest, English is surging ahead more quickly. Last week’s Economist reported on efforts by European news websites, such as Der Spiegel (Germany), NRC Handelsblad (Holland) and Politiken (Denmark) to offer content in English. As The Economist points out, this affords an opportunity for the first real pan-European exchange of ideas:
