Even the French know the game is up, says Rod Liddle. What’s the point in us teaching their language when, in the end, it will be as obsolete as Cornish
It’s a strange thing. Once they have been relieved of office, they start talking a modicum of sense. First we have Ed Balls suggesting that all foreigners should go home because the River Tiber is beginning to foam with much blood, just like Enoch — a Labour supporter himself for a while, remember — once advised.
And now we have the former minister Chris Bryant telling the French that their language is absolutely pointless and that nobody should bother learning it, not even the French. Teach the kids Mandarin, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic instead, he said. The Tories, suddenly ennobled by power, insisted that this was ‘insulting to the French’. Yes, sure — and your point is?
It is about time someone got to grips with our French obsession, our determination to foist this absurd agglomeration of bastardised Latin verbiage coupled with histrionic tics and shrugs upon the nation’s schoolchildren. There is a move, in some recidivist quarters, to bring back proper Latin in our schools — I don’t see the point, I must admit. But rather that than persist in teaching children a language which is of no consequence whatsoever beyond the borders of France itself, a handful of desperately hopeless countries in West Africa and nine chippy Canadians.
At least Latin has history behind it and a certain logic to its construction. It is true, that as Bryant conceded, French was once the language of diplomacy — but that was more than 100 years ago. It is now the language of nothing, other than the French, and it is time our schools recognised this. Drop it from the curriculum entirely.
We are slow to change these obsessions of ours; others move more quickly. In the schools of the Czech Republic and the former East Germany, nobody bothers terribly much with Russian any more, which was once compulsory from the moment you had emerged from the womb. They learn English, and the more advanced kids learn Spanish or Mandarin.
It is true that the earlier imperative for Warsaw Pact kiddies to pick up the emperor’s lingo had a certain physicality to it, or an implied physicality, but this should not alter our admiration for the speed with which they shrugged it off once the tanks, or threat of tanks, had been removed. Ironically, Russian is probably more important now than it ever was back then, and likely to become more so. I would concede to my kids learning Russian as maybe a fourth- or fifth-choice language, after Spanish, Mandarin and Arabic (and maybe Bahasa Malay/Indonesian). French I would put somewhere in the low fifties, below the important languages (of which there are maybe 12) and below all those languages we Europeans, out of a sense of leftish decency, teach kids in order to keep them alive (Welsh, Gaelic, Sorbian, etc). And maybe a place or two above Hungarian, Finnish or Vietnamese.
The Daily Mail, covering the Chris Bryant story, included a little box to show what the world’s most widely spoken languages really are. Even in this list, French came a very long way down the table. But even these tables — of which there are many different variants, using differing methods of calculation according to the political disposition of the person compiling the list — underestimate the reach of English and its importance.
Usually, our native tongue (or its Americanised equivalent) is placed second to Mandarin as the most widely spoken language; roughly one billion people speaking it, compared to 1.2 billion for Mandarin. But this is a mistake, as Mandarin is not terribly widely spoken at all — it is spoken a lot in China, of course, and in communities of Chinese people outside China. It is not known terribly well in Munich, or Cairo, or Rio de Janeiro or Mogadishu or even Myanmar (a neighbour) — whereas English is. Mandarin is growing, rapidly, in its importance and spread throughout the world, but it is a long, long way behind English. If you were a Filipino businessman conducting a deal with, say, a Flemish company, you would most likely use English as the common language, with Spanish as a close second.
The French know that the game is up; it is evident in the hysterical defensiveness with which they protect their language and try desperately to purge it of anglicisations. It was there in the finals of the Eurovision Song Contest, held in Oslo, when the presenters from every single country in Europe (and beyond), from Azerbaijan through Russia to Romania and Germany, announced their results in English — except for the French, who announced theirs in French. The only country, out of 50 or so, not to use English. That’s desperation — and a forlorn arrogance, of course.
You might expect that globalisation would have a Darwinian effect upon languages, and is already doing so. French will go, perhaps in a time not very distant from our own. My guess is that Portuguese and Italian will go too, as they are both too close to a competing similar language (Spanish) and the language base is too narrow to sustain them. You assume English, Mandarin, Spanish, Urdu, Hindi, Arabic, Russian and so on will be fighting it out in the trenches one of these days, when French is as forgotten as Cornish.
But we have our own arrogance to contend with — evidenced by another battle being fought to keep English free of Americanisms, as if one could ever do such a thing. It is true that much of the recently imported grammar seems to us ugly and coarse, not least the sluttish abandon with which Americans turn nouns into verbs. But the truth is that we hang on the coat tails of this world power, or at least we do until it is not a power any more. And if that means we drop references to ‘fortnight’, refer to pavements as ‘sidewalks’ and ‘get’ a coffee ‘to go’ rather than request one to take away, then so be it. We will have gotten wise; the march of language and its ramifications will have impacted upon us.
In the short term, though, Chris Bryant is absolutely right, and if his comments annoy the French, never mind. Excuse the pun, but English is the lingua franca of the world.
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