Speech impediment

The demise of French as a useful way of communicating with the wider world has been one of the features of my years as a travelling musician. I can recall many conversations around Europe, the southern Mediterranean and Russia that would not have taken place 30 years ago if I and the local people had not been able to deploy French, which for both sides was a second language. It was then still possible to have the feeling that it was as valuable to know French as English. This was never quite the case with German or Italian (which I did use in Tripoli); nor Spanish — potentially the most useful — which was too site-specific.

The speed of this collapse is one of the remarkable things about it. The reason cannot be that the quality of spoken French has declined, though it remains much the most difficult big-country European language to pronounce, especially for English-trained throats, on which point I have a private theory that the Parisians sometime in the past deliberately exaggerated the sounds in their speech so that people like me would sound extra-ridiculous. But the ghastly truth is that literally everyone on this planet has decided that not to know English is a life-retarding debility.

They may not have the opportunity to do anything about it, and so stay at home, but the motivation is universally there. Where the famously unhumorous Parisian waiters used to treat you like a second-class person even if you were trying to speak French to them, now they rush to practise their English at the first hesitation. Armies of young people from all over the globe are working at international brand outlets, like Starbucks, in just about every country (I can vouch for the existence of Starbucks in Beijing, Beirut and Belgrade, to mention only the Bs) in order to practise their English without having to acquire permission to work in Anglophone countries.