Posted on 06/02/2003 7:09:15 PM PDT by Excuse_My_Bellicosity
In the U.S. backlash against all things French -- or at least all things with "French" in their names, like the fries, bread, braid and kiss -- how will French itself fare?
That question has French teachers everywhere en garde.
"Anybody who teaches French is going to be a bit of a Francophile, and we don't want to see our programs suffer," says Janet Landerman, an English and French teacher at Cottonwood High School in Salt Lake County. "Every time there's been an anti-France cartoon or something about 'freedom' fries, we've translated it into French and talked about it. That way the students can separate politics from language."
Like other Utah schools feeling the budget pinch, Cottonwood is evaluating whether it can hang on to all five of its foreign-language programs: Spanish, French, German, Latin and American Sign Language. The school's Latin and French instructors already teach other subjects, and third-year French was not offered this year. But Landerman says advanced French will make a comeback next year, and enrollment so far is stable.
Not so for all programs proliferating the mother tongue of Napoleon Bonaparte, Joan of Arc, Victor Hugo and Celine Dion.
In Utah junior high and high schools, the number of French students fell to 13,426 this year, according to the state Office of Education. That is down from 14,595 in 2000.
Meanwhile, Salt Lake City's French Alliance language school is at its lowest enrollment in five years, says Janick Barger, director of the program that offers three 10-week French courses a year.
"We have a 50 percent decrease compared to the past two years, and it is a bit upsetting," Barger says. "These are individual decisions, though, so the alliance is not taking it as a personal attack."
A recent survey of U.S. universities and French Alliance language schools also revealed a dip in demand for French language courses, particularly in the Southeast, says Chantal Mans-Bonnisseau, cultural attachŽ to the French Embassy in Washington.
Most college students, she says, registered for classes before French and U.S. leaders began scowling at one another over the war in Iraq this spring.
"We'll know better in September if cooling U.S.-France relations have affected university enrollment in French studies," Mans-Bonnisseau said during last week's convention of international educators in Salt Lake City. "This could actually have the countereffect of increasing interest, because people are now feeling the need to understand French culture more than ever."
Traditionally, French has been considered the language of romance, fashion, fine wine, diplomacy and, well, France -- but its current universe is much more diverse, says George Arcand of the Agence universitaire de la Francophonie in Montreal.
Today, there are 51 other Francophone countries, including Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, Vietnam, Morocco, Togo, Lebanon, Cameroon and Haiti.
That is why Cottonwood senior Jennifer Hartel is adding French to a language repertoire that already includes Portuguese, Spanish and English. "French will help me get into international business or tourism," she says. "The more languages you know, the more people you can talk to."
For her part, Olympus High French teacher Juliette Durst says English and French already are too intertwined for any boycott to work. "About 40 percent of English is actually French, and the French use a lot of English words, " Durst says.
Think cul-de-sac, ballet, gourmet, filet mignon, debut.
And Cottonwood Principal Garett Muse contends that if German studies survived the politics of World Wars I and II, French programs can outlive the latest "hiccup" in history.
As national trends go, however, the New York-based Modern Language Association of America reports that college-level French language study in the United States declined between 1990 and 1998 -- from 272,472 students to 199,064. German, Italian, Japanese and Russian also had fewer students.
By contrast, Spanish and American Sign Language studies ballooned. The number of college students taking Spanish jumped from 533,944 to 656,590.
In Utah's secondary schools, Spanish instruction has more than tripled during the past two decades, mushrooming from 13,347 students in 1980 to 44,594 this year.
"Language acquisition has changed from just a fun thing to do to something useful that can be a tool, and high school students are beginning to realize that if their rŽsumŽ says they can speak Spanish, that can help them right here in Utah," Muse says. "Obviously, French may not be as much of a tool here."
Nearly a tenth of the state's population is Hispanic or Latino, according to the 2000 census. And more than 70,000 Utahns speak Spanish at home.
Francophone studies-proponent Jean F. Gounard of Buffalo State University is encouraged by the growing role of Spanish.
"Today, Spanish in the United States is not really a foreign language," he says. "More and more, it's a second language, which puts French in the place of most-studied foreign language."
In fact, the fastest-growing group of French students are Latin Americans, says Olivier Chiche-Portiche of Agence EduFrance, an organization that facilitates study abroad in France. "In the past 10 years, the number of Mexican students studying French has quadrupled."
But David Wilford, president of the Institute for American Universities in Aix-en-Provence, France, says he can understand why some Americans have shied away from studying in France this year.
"I had parents asking me if their kids would be safe in France because our president had come out so overtly against the French president, and they saw images on TV of American restaurants dumping out French wines," Wilford says. "If anything, the fact that our students experienced zero hostility shows that Americans need to understand other cultures and languages better in order to be effective."
They make it sound like a petty little squabble. Gee, all France did was provide aid & comfort to a common enemy and dirctly jeopardize U.S. national security.
My wife took four years of French in high school and two more in college. She claims now that she wished she’d learned something useful – like Spanish.
Of course, we live in an area where there are a lot of Spanish speakers now…
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