As an urban craze to learn the English language rages in China, with some 30,000 English non-academic institutes mushrooming to feed the incredible learning frenzy, nine protectionist organizations in France are stridently decrying the invasion of French by English words. This invasion, the pro-French oppositors say, poses a greater threat to France’s national identity than the imposition of German under the Nazis—an English flood of such proportions, they say, that “There are [today] more English words on the walls of Paris than German words under the Occupation.”
In an article posted from Beijing in the January 19, 2010 issue of
The Financial Times, Geoff Dyer reports that for many individual Chinese, “mastering English is a central part of their seemingly boundless aspirations, a tool to engage with the rest of the world in a way that their parents could never imagine and a path to a more interesting and lucrative career.” Dyer notes that for its part, China’s government has made teaching English in primary schools one of its priorities—“a reflection of its desire for China to play a much bigger role in the global economy.” With such official encouragement, he says, it has been estimated in a recent report “that China may already have more English speakers than India.”
In sharp contrast to China’s love affair with the English language, London-based historian Andrew Roberts writes for
The Wall Street Journal, France has been trying to strengthen and expand its legal protectionism against the linguistic “Anglobalization” of French. After mandating French to be “the language of instruction, work, trade and exchanges and of the public services,” it has even extended that principle to cyberspace by asking “the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development to take up the issue of regulating language content on the Internet.” Until France learns how to be bilingual, Roberts contends, it risks “being left behind in the global market-place, gasping outraged complaints in a tongue fewer and fewer people understand.”
Read Andrew Robert’s “France Will Simply Have to Swallow Anglobalization of Common Language” in The Wall Street Journal now! Read Geoff Dyer’s “English craze highlights Chinese ambitions” in The Financial Times now! THIS WEB PAGE IS NO LONGER AVAILABLE
