The future of French

[kleene*star]

What do you all think about the future of French? I've seen such varying projections, everything from "it's a dying language" to its potentially being one of the top two or three most spoken languages in the world in 40 or 50 years.

Just chiming in to say that the idea that French is a dying language is cuckoo bananas.

Yes, that was poorly worded on my part, I should have been more precise. I haven't seen assessments/predictions suggesting it is a dying language on a global scale, but rather a dying language in some countries and therefore potentially on the decline overall internationally.

With that said, while things might look bleak for French in countries such as Mali, there are other African countries where, anecdotally, I've heard evidence that French language might be getting stronger. A few months back, I met somebody who has family ties to the Ivory Coast - she told me it isn't uncommon these days for kids to grow up speaking French as a first language, because often the parents come from different ethnicities speaking different native languages (therefore French is their best means of communication with each other within the household). So perhaps there will be a divergence in Africa, where the importance of French language grows in some countries, and wanes in others.

Thanks for clearing that up!

Personally I hope that French will die out in Africa because it's a colonial language that should have no place in that continent, IMHO. Same for English and Portuguese and any other colonial language. Just to be clear, of course the local inhabitants should freely decide what language they want to use, so I'm not saying they should not use French, I'm just expressing my very personal hopes for the linguistic future of Africa.

[s_allard]

Although I think it is certainly legitimate to question the future of French in Africa, I personally believe that it is more interesting to study the evolution of the status of the indigenous languages in the so-called francophone countries.

While there is a local elite that is certainly attached to French by way of education in French if not in France, it is interesting to also see the unstoppable rise of some widespread medium of communication based on one or more indigenous languages, often with some French influence.

Things might seem to be moving slowly because these sorts of changes take generations but we are seeing the examples of Wolof in Sénégal and Bambara in Mali where one language is emerging as a national language. Then there are the synthetic local languages like Nouchi in Côte d’Ivoire or Camfranglais in the Cameroons that are also slowly gaining in social status.

In my opinion what is happening everywhere is the interaction of the elitist French with the majority indigenous languages. Inevitably there arises a sort of linguistic continuum between the two. Depending on the local political and sociological circumstances, some indigenous language or linguistic creation will emerge as a dominant majority language that can coexist with local languages.

This by the way is not very different from what took place in probably all the countries of the world where we have national languages that bear the name of the country. Examples like French, Italian, Spanish, German, and even English, come to mind.

Who knows, maybe in a few generations we will be speaking of Sénégalese, Ivoirien and Malien as national languages.

[DaveAgain]

In my opinion what is happening everywhere is the interaction of the elitist French with the majority indigenous languages. Inevitably there arises a sort of linguistic continuum between the two. Depending on the local political and sociological circumstances, some indigenous language or linguistic creation will emerge as a dominant majority language that can coexist with local languages.

This by the way is not very different from what took place in probably all the countries of the world where we have national languages that bear the name of the country. Examples like French, Italian, Spanish, German, and even English, come to mind.

Who knows, maybe in a few generations we will be speaking of Sénégalese, Ivoirien and Malien as national languages.

But as this thread has made clear, French isn't an elitist language in these countries. Everyone is educated in French, and in many urban areas it appears to have become the native language. European examples suggest that the urban language eventually becomes the rural language too.

[Cainntear]

But as this thread has made clear, French isn't an elitist language in these countries. Everyone is educated in French, and in many urban areas it appears to have become the native language. European examples suggest that the urban language eventually becomes the rural language too.

Has this thread made that clear? I don't believe it has.

A language that is dominant in the educational system can still be elitist even if everyone is schooled in it.
Dominance of the language of education can become a shibboleth of being "intelligent". School teachers who don't speak it well will lead to school pupils who don't speak it well.
Well-off families will send their children to schools where the teachers are better at French so that their children get the "advantage" of good French, and rural workers will go to schools with teachers not as good at French.

This then sets up a stratified society where the elites believe that speaking good French is a sign of intelligence, and kid themselves on that the poor families have had the same opportunity as their families, and not learned "good French" despite being fully schooled in French, without giving consideration to the fact that the kids from poor families have picked up the language that was presented to them just as well as the kids from rich families -- the difference was just the language model they were presented.

This form of elitism is hard to shift as long as you're putting one particular language on a pedestal....

[emk]

This then sets up a stratified society where the elites believe that speaking good French is a sign of intelligence, and kid themselves on that the poor families have had the same opportunity as their families, and not learned "good French" despite being fully schooled in French, without giving consideration to the fact that the kids from poor families have picked up the language that was presented to them just as well as the kids from rich families -- the difference was just the language model they were presented.

There's an interesting complication here with multilingualism. I once had a great language exchange with a North African engineer. He spoke Berber at home. He'd learned Arabic, because he lived in a Muslim nation which used Arabic extensively. He'd done most of his studies in French. And he was working on English, because English is obviously useful.

I remember a linguistics professor who argued something like, "All bilingual societies eventually wind up being run by, and for the benefit of a bilingual elite." Speaking as an outsider, I strongly suspect that some like this has happened in certain parts of Montreal. I remember stats saying that only 40% of jobs were realistically open to monolingual French speakers, and only 10% of jobs were open to monolingual English speakers. 50% of the actual jobs required knowledge of both English and French. And so monolingual people had a choice. They could complain about the unfairness of it all, or they could invest 500 hours to get conversational in a second language. The latter is enough to get people over the hump, and they'll have lots of opportunities to improve their weaker language naturally.

And so I have encountered plenty of people around Montreal who seem to put great value on their personal bilingualism. Their ideal isn't to speak English, or to speak French. It's to be able to effortlessly switch between the two as needed.

And I think that's what was going on with North African engineer. The true marker of being smart isn't speaking French instead of Berber, or of speaking good French instead of bad French. It's being able to switch between Berber and Arabic and French and English as needed.

(In this framework, the goal of bill 96 could be interepreted as an effort to surpress the trend towards "elite bilingualism" in Montreal, and to guarantee a wide variety of rights to monolingual French speakers. But there are a lot of complications here, and I don't understand most of them.)

[CaroleR]

(In this framework, the goal of bill 96 could be interepreted as an effort to surpress the trend towards "elite bilingualism" in Montreal, and to guarantee a wide variety of rights to monolingual French speakers. But there are a lot of complications here, and I don't understand most of them.)

Radio-Canada story of Apr 27, 24 « Protection du français : Québec promet des mesures jamais vue auparavant » (Quebec promises measures never before seen.) The story continues the next day (April 28, obvs). « Au Québec, l'avenir s'écrit en français » (In Quebec, the future is written in French.) They have a plan, and they're pouring a fair amount of money into it. Bill 96 is not enough, apparently. There's a list of the measures in the second story. One is to force digital platforms to provide more content in French. This is similar to the Canadian law that forces radio and television to provide Canadian content, which we call CanCon. I'm not sure if this has been updated to include digital platforms.

Side note: I ran into a disgruntled-Anglo-Quebec ex-pat the other day. When he said he was from Quebec I happily said "moi aussi!" He was having none of it and said, "I'm English." And, without thinking, I said, "moi aussi!" According to him, it's becoming impossible for unilingual anglophones to live in Quebec these days.

[emk]

Side note: I ran into a disgruntled-Anglo-Quebec ex-pat the other day. When he said he was from Quebec I happily said "moi aussi!" He was having none of it and said, "I'm English." And, without thinking, I said, "moi aussi!" According to him, it's becoming impossible for unilingual anglophones to live in Quebec these days.

Honestly, I do not understand the logic of being a monolingual anglophone in Montreal, not for more than a couple of years. You can put in 500 hours of work to reach a very usable level of French, and you can benefit from that for life. Or you can spend 500 hours complaining about the situation. There's a historically anglophone neighborhood on the western shore of the island that I visit fairly often, and those professional-class, historical anglophones can all have a nice little conversation in French. And most of them are quite happy to do it.

About 5–10 years ago now, I remember speaking with both a monolingual anglophone and a monolingual francophone in Montreal. And their complaints were nearly identical, in both tone and content. The monolingual anglophone found it nearly impossible to function and found the whole situation enormously frustrating. But the monolingual francophone told almost the same story, with nearly identical frustrations. That's when I went and looked up the statistics on jobs by language, and saw that over 50% of jobs in Montreal required people to be bilingual, or at least B1 in their weaker lanugage.

And oddly, some of the strongest pushback I've seen on bill 96 has come from francophone parents in Montreal who are trying to provide bilingual educations for their kids. There is clearly an ideal, at least in some sectors of society in Montreal, that effortless bilingualism is something to be proud of.

And again, I'm approaching this as a language learner, so I'm usually biased towards either (1) multilingualism, or (2) anything which gives me more opportunities to practice French. (Which can be contradictory goals.) But the larger issue is complicated, and I have not been paying nearly enough attention.

[Cainntear]

And I think that's what was going on with North African engineer. The true marker of being smart isn't speaking French instead of Berber, or of speaking good French instead of bad French. It's being able to switch between Berber and Arabic and French and English as needed.

Well that is perhaps the truest marker of intelligence, but elites are perfectly capable of finding an arbitrary marker that is totally unrelated to genuine intelligence and convincing themselves that it is a real marker of intelligence.

[s_allard]

In my opinion what is happening everywhere is the interaction of the elitist French with the majority indigenous languages. Inevitably there arises a sort of linguistic continuum between the two. Depending on the local political and sociological circumstances, some indigenous language or linguistic creation will emerge as a dominant majority language that can coexist with local languages.

This by the way is not very different from what took place in probably all the countries of the world where we have national languages that bear the name of the country. Examples like French, Italian, Spanish, German, and even English, come to mind.

Who knows, maybe in a few generations we will be speaking of Sénégalese, Ivoirien and Malien as national languages.

But as this thread has made clear, French isn't an elitist language in these countries. Everyone is educated in French, and in many urban areas it appears to have become the native language. European examples suggest that the urban language eventually becomes the rural language too.

I don’t see where it has been made clear in this thread that French is not an elitist language in these (African) countries. In what countries ? Take the biggest supposedly French-speaking country, la République démocratique du Congo (RDC) with a population of around 100 million people. This is supposedly the largest French-speaking country in the world, ahead of France. The capital, Kinshasa, has a population larger than that of Paris.

Is Kinshasa as French-speaking as Paris ? Well, the answer gets a bit complicated or complex when we start to talk about what kind of French is exactly spoken in RDC. As I mentioned in my post, there is a language continuum between a form of euro-centric but noticeably Congolese, French spoken by a small fraction of the population and the French spoken by vast majority of the population who also speak other languages such as Lingala and Swahili.

The Congolese obviously do not speak like the Parisians. I’m quite sure that most people from France do not find the French language of Kinshasa very attractive. Even the French spoken by Congolese radio and television announcers is very different from that of their European counterparts. This is only normal because of the influence of the substrate Congolese languages.

The simple truth is that French is the official language of the RDC but not the native language of the majority of the population.

[CaroleR]

But the larger issue is complicated...

You can say that again! I could go on and on about that but it might get too political. I will say that I think the frustrated anglophones are generally older. (The gentleman I mentioned is probably in his 70s.) They would have lived in a time when it was easy to be monolingual English, particularly in Montreal. French was often poorly taught and many people couldn't speak the language when they left school. Much of the business was conducted in English, so they didn't need to anyway. I'm thinking particularly of (the former) St James Street (now rue St-Jacques) in the business district in Montreal. Totally English. And when you consider that some people (comme moi) come from multi-generational anglo-Quebec families, it's kind of understandable that some of them feel resentful when they perceive that they're losing rights. Not to mention feeling unwelcome in their homeland. I relate to that.

Things have changed a lot, though, and now it seems weird that anyone is monolingual in Montreal. Especially since there are more resources to learn a language now than in the olden days. I can understand the francophone parents wanting their children to be bilingual. How can they not be, living in North America? Same goes for not speaking French in Quebec. I'm at a point where I understand both sides, but it's taken a while.

Having said all that, I wish everyone knew how beneficial it is for brain health to be bilingual. Maybe if they knew they could prevent, or at least delay, dementia, they'd be more inclined to learn another language. Not to mention, it's fun! And if Quebec has anything to say about it (and they do*), the future of French is secure.

* Yikes, I've used a plural to agree with a singular entity. The Brits on this site must be rubbing off on me.