Global Policy Forum

By Jon Henley

Visit the website of the European central bank, click on the icon for its French-language pages and you will be politely advised that the bulk of the site is unfortunately in English, and you should perhaps try the Bank of France's homepage for information in French.

Chat to any self-respecting French businessman and he will stare blankly when you talk of un ordinateur portatif, un agenda électronique, une banque de données or la marge brute d'auto-financement - he prefers le laptop, le PDA, le database and le cash-flow.

"The first instrument of a people's genius," wrote the author Stendhal, "is its language." In which case, the French are in trouble. Already drowning at home in a rising tide of what stalwarts see as vulgar and inelegant English, their tongue is now in grave danger of disappearing from the international scene altogether.

"What is at stake is the survival of our culture. It is a life or death matter," said Jacques Viot, head of the Alliance Franí§aise, which promotes French abroad, warned last month. Hélí¨ne Carrí¨re d'Encausse of the Académie Franí§aise was equally apocalyptic: "The defence of our language must be the major national cause of the new century," she said.

For a country that has long proclaimed its tongue the language of love, of global diplomacy and the rights of man, the threat is taken seriously. Few here complained when a francophobic US senator recently described French as "a near-forgotten" language; many realise that unless something is done, he could very soon be right.

Within France, the language benefits from a veritable battery of protective laws, decrees and directives. Radio stations must play mostly music with French lyrics, and advertisements in English are, with few exceptions, outlawed unless accompanied by a translation.

Most of the legislation stems from the 1994 "loi Toubon", which briefly threatened jail for anyone using words like "le weekend" or "le parking". Even today, companies are occasionally prosecuted - although not as often as organisations such as the Committee for the Defence of the French Language, one of a myriad of similar militant bodies, would like - for using anglicisms in ads and brochures.

Few other countries have a 400-year-old institution like the Académie Franí§aise, whose main duty is to act as linguistic watchdog, chiding bad French and approving good. The general commission on terminology and neology, a government body responsible for creating acceptable Gallic alternatives for Anglo-Saxon interlopers, is also highly active, last month banning the word "email" from all official usage in favour of the ungainly "courriel".

But that term is no more likely to find popular acceptance in France than previous complex and wordy commission coinages intended to replace - to name just a few of its 8,000 most recent recommendations - le start-up, le stock-option, le golden boy, le debriefing, le happy few, and le show business.

"We have a plethora of means of protecting the language," insisted Bernard Cerquiglini, the head of the unit within France's culture ministry charged with promoting French. "But language is living history. It reflects the balance of powers," he added: a tacit admission that the scales are currently tipped against French.

Most reasonable French people would probably admit the country is fighting a losing battle against the internet-propelled influx of English within France. But abroad, the battle is only just beginning.

French and English remain the only two world languages with solid roots on five continents. According to the British government, a quarter of the world's population speak English with some level of competence, whereas French, with its 80m native practitioners, is ranked the 11th most spoken language in the world and the ninth most popular as a second language with 180 million speakers.

That position is now threatened as more and more countries make just one foreign language obligatory in schools, prompting the French government to launch a big diplomatic initiative aimed at encouraging two foreign languages on the curriculum. It has notched up some successes: in Spain, where only 250,000 pupils were learning French in 2000, 1.3 million are now taught it.

But equally worryingly, French shows every sign of being gradually driven out of the prestigious diplomatic arena. Even at havens of multiculturalism such as the United Nations, where French is one of the official working languages, French diplomats report an inexorable decline in its use over the past couple of decades.

The situation is worse still within Europe. In 1986, according to an EU report published last month, 58% of European commission documents were originally published in French, compared with a mere 30% last year. As for European council documents, only 28% were written in French last year against 59% in English - whereas the two languages were level as recently as 1997, at about 42% each.

Things are unlikely to get any better. When the 10 new mainly eastern European entrants join the union next year, the fact that 62% of their political elites claim to master English (compared with just 7% who speak French) will inevitably entail a further drastic reduction in the use of "la langue de Molií¨re".

With more than 420 possible linguistic combinations now theoretically possible, France fears everyone will simply give up and speak English - as is already happening at the sharp end of EU affairs: the French army generals in charge of the EU peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo had no hesitation in naming English the working language of their Paris headquarters.

France has also suffered linguistic setbacks on the EU legal front. Last year Brussels forced Paris to abandon a longstanding law requiring all descriptions and advertising for food products, including those imported from foreign countries, to be written in French (the government instantly responded with a new law demanding that shops and supermarkets provide a translation).

"The time has come for concrete and targeted action," said Michel Herbillon, a campaigning conservative MP who recently completed a report on France's language problems within the EU. "The union recognises the principle of equality for all official languages, and that principle is manifestly being flouted. It is wholly unacceptable."

The situation is serious enough for President Jacques Chirac - who speaks excellent English but avoids using it as a matter of principle - to intervene. Earlier this year, he asked France's media companies to come up with plans for a French-language global news channel, a kind of "CNN í  la franí§aise", to ensure France's voice continues to be heard in the world.

Jean-Marie Cavada, the head of the state-owned broadcaster Radio-France, said the stakes were high, but France was determined. "A language is more than just a way of speaking," he said. "It is a weapon of battle - an indispensable tool for any great country."

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