Section: The Story of French Excerpts

1867: French Speakers in an Independent Canada

By Nadeau&Barlow | June 29, 2012

Excerpt taken from the book The Story of French (Ch. 10)

Perhaps because of their numbers, the French Canadians were always more politically assertive than either the Acadians or the Cajuns. Through political manoeuvres they forced the British authorities to keep certain French institutions, and even to grant Quebec its own parliament in 1791, which French Canadians have dominated ever since. By 1867 French Canadians made up only a third of Canada’s total population, but they still constituted a large majority in the province of Quebec. The Canadian constitution, the British North America Act, which was written that year, was the high-water mark of French-Canadian assertiveness. It united the five colonies of British North America and created an independent Canada. French Canadians had made sure that Canada became a federation of former colonies rather than a unitary state, so French speakers would have some clout in Canadian politics. Read more »

Also posted in Various | Leave a comment

French Colonialism and the French Language

By Nadeau&Barlow | June 1, 2012

**Excerpt taken from the book The Story of French (Ch.9)**

The heritage of French colonialism is complex, and nowhere more so than where language is concerned. We met a young fundamentalist in Tlemcen who said he refused to speak the language of the colonizer and went as far as pretending he only spoke English (though he spoke it with a French accent). But the hostility towards France doesn’t translate neatly into a rejection of French. Among the former colonies, Algeria actually has the highest proportion of French speakers, to the point that French is hardly even a second language there. Half the population speaks French fluently, eighty percent of Algerian newspapers and most of the TV channels are French, and nearly everyone has some understanding of it.

The fact is, despite how painful Algeria’s colonial history was, the country is a striking example of how successful the French were in spreading their language during the second colonial push, which lasted roughly from 1830 to 1960. In many ways the second colonial era was the second great historical opportunity for French. Read more »

Also posted in French / France and Europe, Various | Leave a comment

English Words in French

By Nadeau&Barlow | May 17, 2012

**Excerpt taken from the book The Story of French (Ch.17)**

Photo: Veronica Louis

The main reason that English words are not a threat is that most are either fully integrated into French or swiftly abandoned. According to linguist Françoise Gadet, most borrowings from English are either Frenchified within a decade or fall into disuse. In 1964 French linguist Rene Étiemble wrote a scathing pamphlet called Parlez-vous franglais? (Do You Speak Frenglish?), meant to warn his compatriots against the growing number of English words seeping into their language. Twenty years later, hundreds of the English words he used as examples had already gone out of style and were no longer being used (he subsequently argued that this was the effect of his book). Read more »

Also posted in English, French, French / History | Leave a comment

The Progress of French in Africa

By Nadeau&Barlow | April 26, 2012

**Excerpt taken from the book The Story of French (Ch.14)**

During our travels we tried to get an idea of how much English was displacing French in France’s former colonies. This led us to understand a curious phenomenon. History has led many Americans, British, French, Spanish and Arab speakers to believe that languages are somehow a zero-sum game, that the gains of one language necessarily come at the expense of another. This point of view is widespread among journalists, business people and even diplomats. Yet from what we saw, nothing could be further from the truth. Most Algerians, Senegalese, Indians and Polynesians are at least bilingual (not surprisingly, since only ten countries in the world, and very small ones at that, are classified as strictly monolingual). The progress of French in Algeria and Senegal has made no impression on Arabic or Wolof. By the same token, the progress of French in some former British African colonies (French is now an official second language in Nigeria, for instance) has not affected the status of English there. And of course, in countries where French second-language teaching is the most extensive- Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia-few, if any, have lost their English. Read more »

Also posted in French / Francophonie, Language Learning | Leave a comment

The Origin of the Word Poutine

By Nadeau&Barlow | March 12, 2012

Excerpt taken from the book The Story of French (Ch.10)

Anglicisms are another feature of French in America. Historically, the French and Quebeckers have had very different relationships with English. While the French have to deal with the relatively recent influence of English as a global language, French Canadians and Acadians have been dealing with the imposing local presence of English for centuries. This has resulted in many borrowings, such as poutine, the name of a Quebec dish of French fries and cheddar cheese curds with brown gravy. An English listener is always surprised to learn that poutine is a corruption of the English pudding, itself a deformation of the French word boudin (a type of blood sausage). Read more »

Also posted in French / History | Leave a comment

Why Do People Learn French?

By Nadeau&Barlow | March 5, 2012

Excerpt taken from the book The Story of French (Ch.11)

Photo: Carlos Porto

Most teachers of French we met and interviewed during the research for this book confirmed to us, with regret in their voices, that French was indeed waging an uphill battle against English in the war of second-language studies. Naturally we were curious to find out what kept them and their students so enthusiastic about French. The teachers cited a wide variety of motivations, ranging from extremely practical reasons to a kind of generalized idealization of the language. But one striking theme shone through in almost all their answers: People learn French to get access to French culture-or a certain idea of it-whether it’s France’s lively literary and artistic scene, French cuisine, French intellectuals, French films or just the French way of life. Read more »

Also posted in French / History, Language Learning, Various | Leave a comment

French as an International Language

By Nadeau&Barlow | February 10, 2012

Excerpt taken from the book The Story of French

As an international language, French is said to be waning. English not so long ago surpassed French as the world’s lingua franca and is now the undisputed international language of business, diplomacy and academic exchange. In numbers of speakers, French ranks only ninth in the world, far behind Chinese, Hindi, Spanish and English, and neck-and-neck with Portuguese. It has relatively little economic clout; the combined GDP of the countries where French is spoken places it far behind English, well behind both Japanese and German, and just ahead of Spanish. French speakers seem to be so insecure that they pass laws banning other languages and spend millions of taxpayers’ dollars making sure their language gets used in literature, music and film. Read more »

Also posted in French / History, Various | Leave a comment

Argot: Criminal Jargon?

By Nadeau&Barlow | January 6, 2012

Excerpt taken from the book The Story of French ( Ch. 8 )

The roots of argot go back as far as those of standard French. In the fifteenth century, Argot was the name of a crime syndicate of brigands, thieves and killers who spoke together in jargon (a deformation of the Norman word garg, throat). Jargon was not a language so much as a system of words that criminals used so they couldn’t be understood by anyone outside the group, in particular the bourgeois and aristocrats they robbed and the authorities who pursued them. By the seventeenth century the bourgeois referred to this criminal jargon as argot. Read more »

Also posted in French / History, Various | Leave a comment

The Revolutionary Calendar

By Nadeau&Barlow | December 23, 2011

Excerpt taken from the book The Story of French (Ch. 6)

Photo: Imageshack.us

The revolutionary government hired the poet Fabre d’Églantine–better known for his bedtime song “Il pleut, il pleut, bergère” (“It’s raining, it’s raining, shepherdess”)–to come up with new names for the days and months. D’Églantine was inspired by the weather and natural cycles, so he used different suffixes for each season, attached to Latin words that corresponded to the typical weather for each month. The fall months were Vendémiaire, Brumaire and Frimaire; the winter months were Nivôse, Pluviôse and Ventôse; the spring months were Germinal, Floréal and Prairial; and the summer months were Messidor, Thermidor and Fructidor. D’Églantine wanted to rename the days after vegetables, animals and farm tools, but the National Assembly probably realized that they were already pushing their luck by trying to name the days after Latin numbers (primedi, duodi, tridi and so on). Read more »

Also posted in French / History, Various | Leave a comment

How did Victor Hugo save the famous cathedral of Notre Dame from demolition?

By Nadeau&Barlow | December 9, 2011

Excerpt taken from the book The Story of French ( Ch. 8 )

Photo: http://www.notredamedeparis.fr

The son of a general in Napoleon’s army, Hugo was only fourteen when he wrote in his schoolbook that he would be “Chateaubriand or nothing.” He started his first literary journal at age seventeen and soon made his mark with poems and a series of popular novels. He wrote with an ease and freedom untypical of his predecessors. At twenty-one Hugo earned himself a royal pension. His first play, Cromwell, turned him into a celebrity. Its preface—in which Hugo made a plea for what he called le grotesque (popular reality) and against the classical canon of unity of time, place and action—was considered the manifesto of French Romanticism. “All too often, the cage of unity contains a mere skeleton,” he wrote. As to the play itself, it was anything but classical, with hundreds of characters and dozens of locations. Read more »

Also posted in French / History, Various | Leave a comment