The Story of French (47 page)

Throughout the twentieth century, dozens of activists created their own francophone associations for dentists, lawyers, mayors, members of Parliament, composers, union leaders, sociologists, economists, school directors and even deans of medical faculties. The oldest, the Association of French-Speaking Pediatricians, was founded in Paris in 1899. One of the largest, the Fédération internationale des professeurs de français (International Federation of Teachers of French), includes some seventy thousand teachers of French from 180 associations in 120 countries. All of these organizations are international forums where people exchange ideas and get exposed to new ideas and ways of doing things. Many, like the Réseau Poincaré pour le français langue de science (Poincaré Network for French as a Language of Science) and the Centre de coopération interuniverstaire franco-québécoise (the Quebec-France Centre for Inter-university Cooperation), are dedicated to the promotion of French in scientific circles. There are in fact so many French-language organizations that another association was created in 1975 to network the networks: the Association francophone d’amité et de liaison (Francophone Association for Friendship and Liaison); it now has more than 132 francophone associations as members.

The two bright lights in this nebula of francophone organizations are TV5 and the Agence universitaire francophone. Though both now operate under the authority of the Francophonie summit, they were created independently and stand as sister rather than children organizations of the OIF. And both have had impressive results in promoting French. The oldest star among francophone organizations is the Agence universitaire francophone. Founded in 1961 by Jean-Marc Léger to link thirty-three universities in Canada and France, the AUF has mushroomed into a network of 525 universities from sixty countries, twenty of which are not even part of the official Francophonie. Part of the AUF’s success dates back to the 1960s, when the rector of the University of Morocco, Mohammed El Fasi, proposed that the AUF extend membership to universities that operated only partially in French. It now networks an additional 350 faculties of French worldwide. In all, some seven thousand researchers work together in some eighteen sectors ranging from engineering to linguistics, demography, agronomy and genetics. The AUF grants about two thousand bursaries a year, as well as awards to researchers such as Van Ga Bui of the University of Dasang in Vietnam, an engineer who designed a new computer model to measure pollution from diesel motors, which he then applied to redesign moped motors in his country.

While in Dakar, we made an impromptu visit to the AUF’s virtual campus at the Université Cheikh Anta Diop. Opened in 2000, it is certainly among Dakar’s most well-kept buildings, with state-of-the-art electronic equipment and the country’s only three video-conference rooms. The campus offers training and tools for technicians working in network management, professors in online program development, students doing research, entrepreneurs looking for a good start-up environment, and archivists who need large-scale capacity to scan documents. When we visited the campus, a marketing professor there had just begun a class on website creation. Frantz Fangong, who is in charge of project development, proudly told us that the University of Saint-Louis, north of Dakar, had created a full curriculum for teaching the brand new field of cyberspace law. “It took them a year to develop it. This is incredibly specialized, and it is stunning to think that it could come from here and not a university in Quebec or France or Belgium.”

The AUF’s achievement has been to stimulate research in French and even raise the demand for French at some university campuses, notably in Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe. French is still strong among the intellectual elite of Hungary, largely because of the AUF’s work. In Southeast Asia the number of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian university students who learn French or learn in French had risen to forty thousand in 2003, and the increase was due largely to the work of the AUF, which runs the Technology Institute of Cambodia, among other things. Such links are also being built elsewhere: Through the AUF, the biology department of the University of Havana is linked with the Pasteur Institute in Paris, and has developed a French-language option in the department. “We do all this with a forty-one-million-euro budget,” Michèle Gendreau-Massaloux, the rector of AUF, told us when we met her at her Paris office. “French is still a language of science. And not just for French-speaking countries.”

When you visit Beijing, Tokyo or London, your hotel TV will likely receive a French channel. And chances are it will be TV5, the world’s most successful French cable channel, to which 160 million households and three million hotel rooms subscribe worldwide. TV5 was created in 1984, when five TV channels (three French, one Belgian and one Swiss) decided to pool their programs into a sort of international TV digest—a collage of their best shows. TV5 did not have auspicious beginnings. It had trouble sticking to a schedule, and the programming choices were not as good as people expected. But the shows got progressively better as other TV channels joined in, most notably Radio-Canada, Canada’s National French-language network. In the mid-1990s TV5 acquired a strong private-sector management team and built an international distribution network of six thousand cable companies and fifty-five satellite operators. The channel invested heavily in subtitles in English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Dutch and Swedish to reach audiences outside the French-speaking world. Today, among international channels TV5 ranks third behind MTV and CNN, and ahead of BBC World, Aljazeera and Deutsche Welle. In Europe ninety million homes receive the French-language channel. In Algeria alone, two million people watch TV5.

TV5 also has an educational wing that produces a full range of services for French teachers abroad. Every month some forty thousand French teachers tap into TV5’s documentaries and series by consulting eight hundred thousand videos online, and thirty-two thousand teachers are registered in TV5’s “Teach and Learn” program. The website TV5.org offers tips on using the French language, an interactive French dictionary and dictation exercises by the popular literary critic and French-language guru Bernard Pivot. In Africa, where infrastructure is always a problem, TV5 is shown in ten
télé-cafés
called the Maisons TV5. These were created in Burkina Faso in 2001 and later spread to Benin and Senegal. TV5 is considering expanding the initiative to all developing countries.

In 2005, for the publication of our previous book, Jean-Benoît spent a couple of hours at TV5’s head office in Paris in the company of the channel’s assistant news director and star interviewer, Xavier Lambrecht. At a glance, the cramped office had more in common with a regional TV studio than an important international TV channel. As Lambrecht explained, “TV5 used to broadcast the national newscast of national channels. Now the staff rewrites every news item with the world in mind. We found ways of doing this with very little staff.” Specifically, TV5 has its own newsroom staffed with forty journalists who tap into fourteen affiliated networks, including Radio-Canada. By the time of the World Trade Center attacks in 2001, TV5 was in a position to deliver real-time reporting on location. During the Iraqi war it produced ten newscasts a day. It has managed to do all this with a shoestring budget of eighty-five million euros, twelve million of which go to the newsroom alone, a pittance compared to the thirty million dollars CNN spent covering the first month of the Iraqi war.

TV5’s mission has always been to break the quasi-monopoly of Anglo-American news images and content. Part of its success in doing so has come from the way it has positioned itself as an alternative media source between American news and Aljazeera. This approach is paying off: TV5’s biggest viewer gains in 2003 were in English-speaking countries such as the U.S., the U.K. and South Africa. In the latter two the public was attracted by the alternative news perspective. Since then TV5 has become a fixture at the U.N. headquarters in New York, a market from which it was totally absent before 2003.

Since 2005 TV5 has gone even further by relabelling itself TV5-Monde (TV5 World). The late Serge Adda, head of TV5 until his death in 2005 and the main brain behind the channel’s renewal, had been adamant about what he called the
décloisonnement
(decompartmentalization) of cultures. “I didn’t want an African film just to be for Africans. African cinema must be seen in Hanoi, Tokyo, Rio, Dakar, Cairo, and conversely.”

TV5’s motto, taken from seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal, is “
Le centre du monde est partout
” (“The centre of the world is everywhere”). It could be the motto of the Francophonie as a whole, and in a way it is a good summary of the next chapters in the story of French.

Part Four ~

Change

Chapter 17 ~

The Struggle for Standards

While we were visiting Paris in the fall of 2005, the Catholic newspaper
La Croix
published a special issue exploring why kids from well-off areas were mimicking the speech of the
cités,
the low-income suburban housing developments, particularly around Paris. These suburbs, largely populated by African and North African immigrants, are well-known for producing vibrant forms of Arabic-influenced argot. But as the journalists from
La Croix
noted, middle-class French teenagers had also started to
bousculer
(upset, shake up) French, using the language of the
cités.
To illustrate the phenomenon, one journalist quoted an SMS (short message service) text message passed from one French teenager to another on a cell phone: “
Kestufé? Tnaz? Je VO6né. A2M’1.
” It was a phonetic transcription, mixing letters and numbers, of “
Qu’est-ce tu fais? T’es naze? Je vais au ciné. À demain
” (“What are you doing? Are you out of it? I’m going to see a movie. See you tomorrow”).

It was hardly a coincidence that
La Croix
was exploring the question of argot at this particular time. Several weeks earlier, two youths in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois had been electrocuted when they hid from the police inside a transformer. Violence had been brewing for decades in France’s
cités,
but the intensity of the reaction to these deaths stunned the French. Uprisings started around Paris and quickly spread to poor suburbs throughout France, where they went on for four weeks. Every night residents gathered to protest, while disaffected youth throughout France took to burning cars at the rate of a thousand a day. French newspapers, TV and radio examined the situation, first from the angle of immigration policies, then of France’s failure to integrate immigrants and the role of Islam in the suburbs, before finally looking at it through the lens of language.

Using examples like that of the SMS message,
La Croix
journalists reported that, more and more, French writing was imitating speech rather than speech imitating writing (still considered the ideal in French). They noted that young people were using bad grammar (the
qu’est-ce tu fais
rendered into
kestufé
is incorrect; the correct form would be
qu’est-ce QUE tu fais
); acknowledged the generalization of slang (the expression
naze
originated in argot); and pointed out how teenagers were using phonetic rather than proper spellings, and even numbers.

While the
La Croix
journalists presented their observations as groundbreaking, there was nothing really new about what they wrote. During the two years we spent researching this book, almost all the teachers and commentators we met bemoaned the “declining” state of French in exactly the same terms as those used by the
La Croix
journalists.

Is French really in decline? In the debates over what constitutes ideal versus real French, there is a lot of speculation about where French is going. What is clear is that French is changing. Linguists and sociolinguists have assessed the nature of these changes, or supposed changes, in phonetics, grammar and vocabulary, particularly since 1945. Some of their observations are surprising; at the very least, they prove that change has been going on for centuries and that, contrary to purist ideology, the French language is not fixed, but in constant evolution. But studies also suggest that change is not happening the way most francophones assume it is. Most of this discussion will concentrate on France, with examples from other francophone locations, a choice we made for two reasons. First, we have already established that there are great linguistic variations among francophone countries. And second, France remains to this day the focal point of “standard French”—whether true or imagined—whether linquists call it “central French”, “standard French,” “Parisian French” or “French from France.”

Linguists agree that the most impressive changes in standard French since 1945 have been not in vocabulary, but in pronunciation. Prior to the phonograph, there was no way to record the way people spoke, and before the 1920s, recording quality was so bad that only the clearest, cleanest French could be understood. Linguists had to speculate on pronunciation from rhyming in songs and poetry and other less than scientific sources. But even what they found back then should have shaken the certainty of francophones on the supposed
fixité
(fixedness) of their language. Molière, in the first act of his famous play
The Misanthrope,
makes
je trouve
(I find) rhyme with
veuve
(widow). The very colloquial term
mec
(guy) was a nineteenth-century truncation of
maquereau
(pimp), which people then pronounced
mèquereau.

New technologies have, of course, made it possible to study phonetics more thoroughly. At the end of the 1990s, for the twenty-sixth volume of the
Histoire de la langue française 1945–2000,
linguist Fernand Carton put together an extensive description of French pronunciation at the turn of the millennium. Some of Carton’s findings were surprising—notably, the fact that the accentuation (that is, stress or emphasis) in standard French has been shifting since the Second World War. Among the world’s languages, French has traditionally been famous for its lack of accentuation. If there was any, the stress in words fell on the last syllable and, in sentences, on the last word—known as oxytonism. According to Carton that’s now changing. French accentuation today is moving towards the penultimate (second-last) syllable in about half its words. One hears it in the lyrics of popular French music, especially in rap and rock. The change is so profound that French speakers not only pronounce final E’s that should be silent, they frequently pronounce an E at the end of words where there is none, to mark the displacement of the tonal accent. For example, they say
DONC-e
(so),
bonJOUR-e
and
au reVOIR-e.
In Carton’s opinion, Central French is moving back to the tonal system it had in the Middle Ages, which was similar to that of German, English and Italian today, and resembles the French spoken in southern France.