‘IN PARIS they simply stared when I spoke to them in French,” Mark Twain complained. “I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.” It’s a familiar experience. “Monsieur, s’il vous plait ...” we mumble pathetically in that distinctive Leaving Cert patois they call French but to which so many of us are deeply attached.
There was a time, three decades ago, when this paper carried occasional news reports in French from the Agence France Presse. Now it would be seen as pretentious or elitist, although as many readers certainly still have a sufficient proficiency – maybe more than in our first national language? – and they holiday or have homes there. Occasional phrases are slipped in to articles by Francophile writers, but too often with the sort of grammatical or spelling infelicities that are that much more embarrassing for being in a foreign language – the show-off shown up. (A recent gaffe involved confusion over the word itself and a fisherman’s hook ...)
Time, it would seem, for a few of us to call in to 1 Kildare Street and join the 5,000 who will this year attend classes in that fine institution, the Alliance Française, currently celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of its Dublin establishment. Dedicated to teaching and propagating the language and culture of the 200 million fluent French speakers worldwide, the Alliance offers courses from the most rudimentary conversational to the likes of " français juridique". It is the third largest branch in Europe, after Paris and Brussels.
French may still formally be the language of diplomacy, and one of the languages in which both the UN and EU conduct business, but it is increasingly and sadly eclipsed by the ubiquity of English. Valiant attempts by French politicians to stand Canute-like against this global tide have some of the feel of the efforts of our own language movement.
President Sarkozy recently denounced the "snobisme" – a word of which the Academie Française would certainly not approve – of those of his diplomats who "are happy to speak English" rather than French. He insisted the problem is not English itself but "ready-to-wear culture, uniformity, monolingualism" – in other words, English. He was speaking at another milestone anniversary, the 40th of France's institutional response to that challlenge, the Francophonie – motto " égalité, complémentarité, solidarité" – the 56-member network of states for whom French is a core part of their culture.
Joyeux anniversaires!