Polémique internationale sur l'intérêt d'apprendre le français dans le monde au 21eme siècle.

A somewhat surprising piece in The New York Times this week reported that the French dual-language program in New York's public school system "is booming," the third-largest such program in the city, after Spanish and Chinese. That commitment is a beautiful thing—for children of Francophone immigrants. But for we natives, the idea that kids need to pick up French is now antique. [...]

What, then, will be a new marker of linguistic classiness? One could be to seek languages for actual use rather than as a fashion statement—i.e. to be more like Europeans, where English has become the international language. One learns French to communicate with … who, exactly? Some will yearn to read Sartre and Molière; more power to them. But what about languages like Spanish and Chinese, which are useful to learn because we encounter them in everyday life? I have seen medical professionals just miss getting plum jobs in New York because a competitor happened to speak Spanish, and Chinese will be increasingly important in the business world. Arabic skills, meanwhile, are achingly needed on the geopolitical scene. It’s swell that knowing French allows you to ignore subtitles in the occasional art house film, but unclear why this would be considered a priority of childrearing. [...]

What, then, is the benefit of kids internalizing Comment allez-vous? rather than ¿Como estas?, Nǐ hǎo?, or even Hindi’s Ap kaise hai? All I know is that if my two-year-old turns out to be the language nerd I was, I will counsel her to think of French as a distinctly low priority. I’m trying to learn some Chinese lately. As I laboriously stuff the characters into my head with flash cards and watch natives sweetly wincing as I mangle the tones, I only wish that even as far back as the Watergate era they had been teaching me Chinese instead of the likes of pomme de terre and je m’appelle. Hélas.

Le nombre de personnes parlant le français ne cesse d'augmenter. Et cette dynamique va perdurer si plusieurs conditions sont réunies: la principale étant corrélée au fait que l'Afrique francophone continue d'utiliser le français dans la scolarisation des enfants. Dans cette hypothèse là -qui nous semble presque certaine- on peut estimer à 750 millions les parlants français à l'horizon 2050. sachant qu'en 2010, on recensait 220 millions de francophones dans le monde.

The study’s methodology is somewhat questionable, since it counts as French-speakers all the inhabitants of countries where French is an official language, which probably won’t be the case. And almost certainly, as a second language, English will remain the lingua franca (pun intended).

But the point still stands: French is still a fast-growing, global language. The other mooted language of the future, Mandarin, despite being excruciatingly hard to learn for most Westerners, will probably not be that given China’s certain demographic slide. Meanwhile, French will be present on all continents, and particularly predominant in a continent that, by 2050, should be a fast-growing economic powerhouse–Africa.

If you were to pick a language of the future, you could do a lot worse.

My children won’t learn French. If their school tries to force the issue, I’ll fight tooth and nail. There’ll be the mother of all Agincourts before I let it happen.

It’s not that I have any problem with the language, even though it has too many vowels and you have to say 99 as ‘four-twenty-ten-nine’, making it impossible (I imagine) to sing that song about red balloons.

It’s just that I want my children to be successful, and learning French makes no business sense. There’s a moral issue too, but first the business: no English person moves to France to hatch a business plan these days. They might go there for the lifestyle, or the wine, or to live out their years. But nobody goes there to succeed. [...]

Today if you scratch a poor Francophone country you’ll find France. Unlike Britain, France never really left Africa. An African advisory unit, the Cellule Africaine, has remained in the Élysée Palace since France’s African empire was officially dissolved, capable of shoring up or knocking over rulers as required. Strong bonds of cooperation with Houphouët-Boigny of Ivory Coast, the Bongo regime in Gabon and Mobutu in the former Belgian Congo have kept those countries reliant on French aid and assistance. France has intervened militarily in Africa 30 times since granting its colonies independence; many more times it has backed rebel groups or used intrigue and leverage to install or remove regimes. French special forces helped bring down the Gbagbo regime in Ivory Coast in 2010. Last year the French were in Mali; now they’re in the Central African Republic, where 38 years ago France helped install the ‘African Napoleon’, Bokassa I, removing him three years later when his penchant for cutting people’s ears off and killing schoolchildren became an embarrassment. France maintains a permanent and active presence of 5,000 troops across the most fractured, underdeveloped and politically fragile part of the continent.

Over there, you get a lot of bang for 5,000 men. Africa, according to former President Giscard d’Estaing, remains ‘the sole continent where France could still, with 500 men, change the course of history’. And so it has. But then, Plus ça change, plus c’est pareil.

En 2010, toujours, les pays membres et observateurs de l’OIF ont été à l’origine de plus de 20% des échanges commerciaux mondiaux, alors qu’ils ne totalisent que 14% de la population mondiale.

Ces chiffres montrent la vigueur de la francophonie dans le monde, mais n’enlèvent rien à la situation critique de la plupart des pays africains francophones. Pourtant critique, leur situation le serait peut-être plus encore s’ils n’avaient pas le français pour langue principale. [...]

Alors il n’aura peut-être (plus) jamais le même rayonnement que l’anglais dans le monde des affaires, mais de là à dire qu’il ne sert qu’à commander des croissants dans l’hypothèse où l’on se rendrait en France, c’est un peu fort de café.

Cath a écrit:Pfff.
Prendre une leçon de morale par le représentant d'un pays tellement irréprochable...