[madia_leva]

Sometimes countries insist of fighting wars that have been over for a long time. This is one example. American attitude towards China rise is another example.

Now more seriously, I think what the French are trying to do is just to avoid a complete switch to English in the EU institutions. Since the start of the pandemic, most meetings which used to be multilingual (with interpretation) are now English only and nobody seems to have a big problem with that. If anything, it makes interactions more natural (talking through interpreters is a pain in the ass). French are probably worried that this could be here to stay and are just trying to go back to the status quo.

[galgot]

I think from the French Gov it's just a way to express how fed up they are with UK Gov Brexit policy. They very well know that English is now the predominant language, Macron is in fact the first French president speaking English so well in public. Long gone is the "francophonie" policy of the 80's, the number of French peoples speaking English have increased considerably in the last 15/20 years. I see no "worries" about French being less used from the French officials, more a give up, which is kind of sad. So this move is very political.

[madia_leva]

I don't really think that they care about British on this one. They are gone, after all.

What really happens is that in the 15 last years English has gained space foot in the EU institutions, to the point that they are quickly becoming just English speaking. You have a service which used to homd all meetings in English, a new Croatian, Hungarian or Polish staff member who doesn't speak French arrives and suddenly all the meetings and mass emails are written in English. The opposite doesn't really happen.

After the start of the pandemic French suddenly lost almost all space in meetings with Member States representatives or just multiple services present. They have become English onlycause there is no interpretation anymore and many people can't speak or even understand French. Many people that chose to speak French in meetings (mostly as a matter of principle) now speak English. The change in the last year was huge. French just want to go back to the previous status quo.

[tinomaxgalvin]

Why are they worried? English isn't English anymore. In fact it makes sense to chose a language that isn't the native language of any EU nation. (I'm squinting regarding Ireland).

[madia_leva]

Well, it's history and education.

In every country children are told quite silly things about the world and, in particular, about the importance of their country in the world. This is even worse for current or former empires (UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Greece, Russia, US, China...).

Children there are told they are special and superior in some way to other children who were born in other places. It's not surpising that they end up asuming those lies as something obvious and natural. The most striking example nowdays is of course the United States, just because they are the biggest superpower (China's children are not less indoctrinated, though). Most American adults believe that their country is the biggest democracy the world has ever seen (cough, cough, India), their lifestyle the highest (Scandinavia smiles amusingly with a barely hidden condescending gesture) or that their wars are fought just to defend freedom (and Irak invaded because of the mass destruction weapons, apparently).

In the case of France they take as reference the Napoleonic times where their country was dominant and their language the vehicule of culture and politics in Europe. They also think the French Revolution invented real democracy or something similar (even though American Revolution started more than ten years earlier and Greeks had true democracies a couple thousand years before that).

Of course, those days are long gone, but this is what French are tought since they are small children, so most of them end up believing it.

Nationalism is a serious disease and most countries are infected.

[Agingcoder]

First of all, I don't understand why the French government wants to do that - it's quite ridiculous. However, I also suspect that it has to do this kind of public stunt to satisfy the conservative right wing, especially with the presidential election next year.

Furthermore, I think you are missing something quite fundamental here - French is pretty much one of the core building blocks of France, and no, this is not obvious. 150 years ago, not many people spoke French in France : they spoke Basque, Breton, Occitan, Corsican, Alsacian, and various forms of patois. What brought French everywhere was compulsory education led by missionary style teachers, world war I, and forbidding people from speaking their regional language. In essence, the language was a political tool to unify the country, and the French never stopped considering language as a political tool.

You may assume that this is 'arrogant nationalist French' behavior, but I will disagree.

[madia_leva]

I agree with you, in fact.

The issue is that the fact they decided to impose a single language to all the country is another example of the nationalism I was talking about. Deciding to erradicate existing languages and cultures for nationalistic reasons. That is cultural genocide. It's not unlikely of what Chinese are doing.

You can contrast this with the case of Switzerland or India where you see you can have a strong cohesion and feeling of belonging to the cpuntry without needing to erradicate significant parts of your own culture.

[Agingcoder]

Understood.

I agree with the cultural genocide part, however I'm not sure if they did it for nationalistic reasons ('my country' s great and better') , or for practical reasons ('it would be much better if we spoke the same language and our soldiers could actually communicate' ,etc) unfortunately driven by the hypercentralism which has permeated throughout French history, and still plagues the country to this day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_%28politics%29?wprov=s...

Interesting discussion, I'll read a bit more about French history and language politics!

[disgruntledphd2]

Unfortunately (or fortunately), English is practically the native tongue of Ireland now (and has been since the 18th century, to be honest).