Posted on 02/12/2005 1:31:43 PM PST by FormerACLUmember
Paris - The dominance of English as the world's lingua franca continues to grow, with the number of pupils studying French dwindling every year, language teachers from several countries gathered at a Paris trade show this week said, many with regret.
The predominance of English on the Internet, the relative ease of learning basic English and the perception that English is "cooler" - thanks in large part to popular music and films - means French is becoming more and more restricted to older generations and the upper classes of many countries where it used to be the second language of choice in schools, they said.
"Some among us see a sort of victory in this. But personally, I side with a campaign in the British press against our deficit in learning languages," Julie Squires, a Briton who teaches French at Oxford House College, said at the Expolangues show in southern Paris.
In Britain, she said, much of the problem lies with a recent government decision to make a second language optional for pupils 14 years and older.
Losing ground fast
She pointed to a study which showed that, across British schools, 72% registered a decline in the number of students learning French. German studies declined in 70% of the schools, while Spanish declined by just 44%.
A teacher at Germany's Goethe-Institut, Christina Trojan, said "French remains a beautiful language much appreciated by the upper class" but it was losing ground in curricula, even in areas near the French-German border.
French was still holding up compared to Italian and Spanish, but that may gradually change.
"Given the difficulty of the grammar and spelling, many prefer not to take up French," she said.
A teacher from the Spanish town of Burgos, Julia Martinez, said most of her colleagues agreed that French was "in free fall".
A teacher from Portugal, Teresa Santos, said in her country 70% of Portuguese students preferred to take English courses, compared to just 10% for French.
Even in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, English has crowded French out of the classroom, despite French being one of the country's official languages.
In Russia, where speaking French was once a prized talent among the tsars, French is trailing "far behind English" in Moscow and Saint Petersburg schools, Mascha Sveshnikova, of the Russian Cultural Centre, said.
David Fein, the head of the Alliance Francaise in the United States city of San Diego, said French studies was part of the collateral damage suffered in the transatlantic fall-out resulting from the US decision to invade Iraq, but now it looked as though pupils were slowly returning.
Only two Japanese teachers talked of the future of French with enthusiasm, with one of them saying that the luxurious images the language conjured up were its best advertisement.
French, she said, evoked "dreams, fashion, history, cooking and wine."
"US Internet imperialism"? Sounds like Ward Churchill or Howard Dean babbling away.
I am an unabashed imperialist.
All those years learning Esperanto down the toilet.
yea, we have AlGore to thank for that right?
/sarcasm off
English is indeed easy to learn to speak on a basic level which is what the author of the article said. The present-tense verbs are quite regular (compared to those in many other languages), and English has no gender for nouns. For very, very basic communication, the present tense is all that is required. It is quite easy for the average person to learn to speak some English.
Well, here in Southern California, Spanish seems to be on it's way to being the dominant language. Sigh.
The French will all be speaking Arabic in ten years.
I'm glad that the academic (feminist, etc.) efforts to push that weirdo, pinko Esperanto as a worldwide language failed ("tey" as a unisex pronoun and all of that).
Better tell that to the people who make ATM machines.....
Because it draws on so many other languages, English is an exceedingly rich and subtle language. By comparison, French is impoverished. I forget the exact numbers, but there are more than 10 or 20 times as many words in English as in French.
The Academie Francaise has always been exceedingly inflexible about adopting new words into the language, and the government has repeatedly clamped down on the import of English words, for instance. So French is all the more impoverished.
It is, of course, America that has done most to spread English, coming on top of the Victorian English empire which spread English into India and parts of Africa. American inventiveness, in particular, as well as military and economic importance, has assured that as new fields arise they will use English as their primary terminology.
The Internet has probably put the lid on it. Other languages can be found on the net, but unless you learn English you are confined to tiny ghettos on it.
If they think French is in free-fall now, just wait until Arabic replaces French as the national language of France!
Mostly in your imagination.
HAHAHAHA 'lingua FRANCa'? Get it? FRANCAIS? French? It is part of the latinate definition!!!!
Wow that was a really stupid comment, nice work.
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