The fading French connection

Technorati:French in Asia,Olympic Games French

Greenway wrote this in the IHT, on November 19, 2008:

As summer was ending I went up to St. Andrews in Canada; a pretty little seaport town near where New Brunswick melts into Maine.

There are signs everywhere of a British past. The streets are named Prince of Wales, King, Queen and Princess Royal, not to mention Victoria Terrace. Up the hill is the Loyalist Burying Ground, filled with New Englanders who decided to remain British during the Revolutionary War.

But this is bilingual Canada, and in places where they don't want you to leave your car the signs say: "Stationnement Interdit" as well as "No Parking."

Canadian French may make Parisians wince, but it is French, nonetheless, jealously promoted and mandated by Canada's Francophones even in English-speaking provinces. Canadian politicians when speaking abroad often begin the first couple of paragraphs in French, which will be broadcast back home, before they revert to English.

Elsewhere, the French language isn't doing so well. A recent insult came last summer when the Ladies Professional Golf Association insisted that proficiency in English be required of its players. Libba Galloway, the organization's deputy commissioner, was quoted as saying that since the fan base and the sponsors are mostly English speaking, "we think it is important for our players to effectively communicate in English."

South Korea's golfing star, Se Ri Pak, said: "We play so good all over.... When you win you should give your speech in English." But the rule could run into trouble in the United States, where discrimination on the basis of national origin is illegal.

French used to be the language of diplomacy. Lingua franca means a common language by which people can communicate. But today most diplomats use English as their lingua franca. I remember covering a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, in which the Asian leaders really got to know each other on the golf course speaking English.

English-language schools dot the back streets in former French Indochina, and a meeting of French-speaking countries in Hanoi a few years back had difficulty finding enough local people to make up a French-speaking staff. Attempts by France to insist that French be spoken in Cambodian hospitals donated by France failed miserably when Cambodians demonstrated in favor of English.

The World Economic Forum, which is based in French-speaking Geneva, insists that English be the official language of its annual meeting in German-speaking Davos. But the forum provides a French-speaking dinner for those Francophones who need a little relief.

Some say that fear of English influences French foreign policy. It is said that France backed the murderous Hutu faction in Rwanda because France didn't want English-speaking rebels from Uganda to win. The Rwandan government prepared a 500-page document accusing France of assisting the genocide, and took Rwanda out of the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, or OIF, the French-led association of French-speaking countries.

France denied the charges, but now the former French-speaking Belgian colony is switching its entire educational system from French to English.

The OIF is well financed and, with the help of the Foreign Ministry, tries to make sure that France remains a language of international communication.

The LPGA may stress English, but last summer saw what the Financial Times called an "eccentric quest for perpetual linguistic pre-eminence in the Olympic movement."

Eccentric is not the word any linguistically patriotic Frenchman would have used. After all, was not the modern Olympic movement founded by Baron Pierre de Courbertin? And did not the Belgian head of the International Olympic Committee, Jacques Rogge, declare in Bejing last summer that although English and French were both official languages of the OIC, French took precedence in cases of dispute?

At the Games, signs were in French, English and Chinese, although the Chinese themselves preferred to use English when not speaking their own language.

Spanish, Chinese, even Portuguese, never mind English, may be spoken more than French around the world, but France's effort to keep its beautiful language alive, to turn back the rising tide of English, and combat the dreaded American cultural tsunami has a certain doomed nobility about it.

New Brunswick: "numbers of students dropping Core French at the secondary level are astronomical"

In QUALITY LEARNING IN FRENCH SECOND LANGUAGE IN NEW BRUNSWICK, Sally Rehorick, D.A., C.A.S., Director and Professor, Joseph Dicks, Ph.D, Professor, Paula Kristmanson, Ph.D, Assistant Professor, Fiona Cogswell, M.Ed, Faculty Associate, April 2006:

2. Core French programmes as they currently

exist are not effective in reaching the target

proficiency goal.

3. Although these statistics do not specifically

address attrition rates, we know that there is still a

problem with attrition in French Immersion at the

secondary level, a fact mirrored at the national

level (Rehorick, 2004).

4. The numbers of students dropping Core French

at the secondary level are astronomical.*

* This high attrition can be attributed to students’ perception of lack of success and courses which are “boring, irrelevant and repetitious” (APEF, 2003).

francophone decline in officially bilingual New Brunswick

SAINT JOHN, N.B. — New Brunswick, Canada’s only officially bilingual province, is nearly one-third francophone.
But will it still be in a generation or two? Don’t count on it.
New Brunswick had the largest drop in francophone population of any province between 2001 and 2006, losing 4,000 residents whose mother tongue is French.
That reversed a longer trend in which, from 1961 to 2001, the francophone population increased by 12.4 per cent in New Brunswick.
With 32.4 per cent of New Brunswick now francophone, the community has fallen to less than a third of the province’s population for the first time.
And four trends evident in the 2006 census figures released last week threaten to hasten the slight but steady erosion in francophone numbers:
— the province’s francophone population is aging far more rapidly than the province’s anglophone majority;
— francophones are also increasingly likely to use English most of the time at home;
— francophones accounted for nearly half the net out-migration of New Brunswickers from 2001-06, far in excess of their proportion of the population;
— and the immigrants arriving in modest but increasing numbers in New Brunswick are more often adding to the English-speaking majority.
‘‘Overall, it concerns me and it has for the 30 years I’ve been doing research on this,’’ said Rodrigue Landry, director of the Canadian Institute for Research on Linguistic Minorities, at the University of Moncton.
‘‘Certain trends are almost inescapable when you’re in a minority.’’
Aging is one of those trends.
All of Canada’s population is aging due to low birth rates and higher life expectancy. But add in the increasing use of English in francophone homes, which reduces the transmission of French as a mother tongue, and the francophone population is aging much faster than the anglophone population, says Statistics Canada.
Across Canada, the younger francophone age groups are declining rapidly. The population is not renewing itself.
In New Brunswick, the situation is the same.
Every francophone New Brunswicker under 40 belongs to a generation of francophones with a smaller piece of the overall population than the 32.4 per cent that francophones of all ages represent.
The smallest proportion of the population falls to the francophones under the age of 10: they are less than 27 per cent of the children their age.
It’s middle-aged and older francophones — mostly beyond the age to start their families — who form a demographic bulge. Francophones between 40 and 75 per cent are, together, 35 per cent of the population their age.
In raw numbers, 232,980 New Brunswickers have French as their mother tongue but only 211,665 (21,315 fewer) speak French most often at home.
Francophones primarily using English at home has become more common over time.
In 1971, just 8.7 per cent did so; 20 years later, it was 9.7 per cent. By 2001, it was 10.5 per cent; it had reached 11.2 per cent by 2006.