[Commenting as an HN member born and raised in Côte d'Ivoire] Quite cool to see this topic trending! Some additional context:
Two popular music genres that popularized nouchi in Côte d'Ivoire and then France are "Zouglou" (1990s) and "Coupé-Décalé" (2000-2010s). Both are past their primes but it's interesting to watch now the diffusion process into the French culture. In 2019, a few nouchi words were added to the Larousse dictionary: https://www.france24.com/fr/20190601cote-ivoire-nouchi-argot...
I'm a french (non Parisian) reader, and was very surprised by the comments I read.
More precisely, the near 100% percent agreement on "french are despising non native speakers, especially the Parisians".
I really don't feel it this way and am so surprised. I don't have more to add since I really never thought about this.
Speaking of English: I work in an international company since one year and am I the process of becoming fluent: native speakers are the hardest to understand for me. The easiest being the french, but surprisingly, a strong Italian or Moroccan accent isn't stopping me at all.
I think because they pronounce more of the words while native speakers use more contracted form where they don't even pronounce part of some words.
The pace isn't a problem, it's really the absence of part of the phrase that is hard for me.
I have more trouble understanding Indian, Australian than Americans, but it may be due that I watch a lot of American made content and am more used to their accent.
I'm not surprised. I'm from Quebec. I am more comfortable speaking English with anyone than I am speaking French around French people. They just can't get over the accent, like I'm some sort of curiosity at the zoo. There are so many YouTube videos of French people mocking us. It's not curiosity but a distinctly French superiority complex.
My friends who learned French had similar struggles in France versus elsewhere.
There are obviously going to be some cases of that. I remember hearing through a friend that their university roommate from France dropped a class at UQAM because they couldn't take their lecturer's accent seriously. You have elitist people elsewhere.
When visiting France I had one experience where I felt like I was a zoo animal, like that. Walking around a public site a woman got very excited like she found the answer to a tricky riddle and yelled "Québec, Québec" at me. She was so sweet though and it was harmless so I didn't take it even the slightest bit poorly.
Most people in France knew better than to make a stink about it. I talked with plenty of people and occaisionally it popped up but more as a passing curiosity, I didn't feel like it wasn't outside of natural curiosity. Things like "pas pire" raised eyebrows "stationner mon char" rather than "parker mon auto" sometimes took people a minute to comprehend.
All to say, there are some rude people everywhere, but my own experience in French with a Québec accent was great.
I'm in Canada but English. Years ago a French co-worker from New Brunswick went to northern France on vacation.
He's Acadian French for those non-Canadian or non-French reading this that's different than Quebec, how? I'm not sure.
But the guy told me the people the people there were amazed by his accent. Apparently it wasn't like Quebec accent it was more old French but I guess not the slang of Quebec French? Not sure but I guess it was a hoot and he had fun.
From what I know Acadians originally emigrated from northern France area. So maybe Acadian French is closer match to Parisian standard French than Quebec French?
I would say Acadian is probably as far from France French as Québecois is, but it certainly has some fascinating qualities. They use old French words there that have changed everywhere else French is spoken (aside maybe Louisianna French).
My favourite anecdotal example (though I couldn't find any proof looking it up) is that "to kill" it's "killer".
I am not French but I heard good things from some colleagues from Quebec (exactly like you, surprisingly) that speak French to native French colleagues as soon as they get a chance to, because they like to do so and don't feel mocked at all.
Of course they are aware of the accents, but you can still have fun and talk to each other. Then, of course, if the French mock them behind their back when they are alone, I will probably never know.
I'm french and I think you are mistaking several things:
- Mocking Quebec accent is not 'superiority': it just happens that your accent kind of sounds funny for some reason that I have no other reality behind, probably some specific sounds bites make it 'funny'. I've always thought it's in good fun and certainly not disparaging. All french people I've met including myself have stellar opinion of people from quebec (even more than of their fellow french).
- I've never ever head someone making fun of another non-native french speaker accent. In fact we're happy when someone likes french
I live in Canada, and the folks I know who live in France (direct blood relatives) have mentioned that Quebec French sounds like a weird mix of Russian and Valley Girl, with a few weird terms mixed in.
The English equivalent would be something like a deep Northern England accent which sounds goofy to my N. American ears.
More than 20 years ago I visited Montréal. It was difficult to participate in discussions with french-speaking people because I could understand some participants very well and others not at all, just because there are different degrees of accent. In constrast, it was easy to understand any english-speaking person.
> There are so many YouTube videos of French people mocking us. It's not curiosity but a distinctly French superiority complex.
Nope, we also mock our own accents. There are many of them across our country. It's just for fun, we still like you.
Yeah, I remember how I tried to order coffee in a restaurant in Paris. Even though coffee sounds almost exactly the same both in French and in English the dude refused to understand what I need. Probably it was just for fun, but this type of fun is what stops me from visiting Paris ever again.
Native German speaker from Austria here who has been living in Quebec for many years.
I had to study and pass my exams in standard French with a Parisian institution. This is made obligatory by the Quebec government for immigrants if they want to stay and apply for a PR.
Anyways, the insight I want to share here is that Quebecois French is much closer to Austrian or Bavarian German vs Standard German.
Both share a similar trajectory with their standard counterparts, diverging over centuries but in the end remaining more comprehensible compared to Swiss German.
Quebecois, evolving since the 17th century from settlers' French and Austrian/Bavarian dialects, shaped since the 6th century's “Lautverschiebung” are also old but less divergent branches.
Swiss German, though also rooted in the High German shift, has veered more distinctly. Watching Swiss TV (SRF), I only get about 80-90% due to that deeper linguistic forking.
Standard Quebecois has not been much harder for me to understand than standard French. Like in Austrian German there are certain “quirks” but again much easier to parse from context than with Swiss German.
Of course there might be the case where a heavy local dialect becomes even harder to understand than say Swiss German even. German language learners could test their comprehension of Swiss vs going to a pub in Wien Ottakring or into a deep recess of the Tyrollean alps. I’d guess some encounters would be minimum as hard to understand if not harder. Same for rural Quebec etc. Then again the underlying grammar even can be really different in fundamental ways with Swiss German which is not the case for Quebecois.
TL;DR standard Quebecois is easier to understand and much closer to standard French than standard Swiss German is to standard German.
IMHO: France has just been very steadfast about language standardization up to this day and across its zone of influence. E.g. there even is obligatory standard French language learning in Quebec for immigrants and possibly public schools as well. So for some people from France they often don’t have developed the “muscle” for even slight derivations. In addition not much proficiency in “foreign languages” in general especially for older generations.
It's more from ignorance than anything. I speak Quebec French and had little trouble being understood in France in the two times I've visited. I have folks from France, French Africa, and Haïti here at my job. It's more just ignorance about the accent than a lack of actual experience not being able to understand it. It's certainly not analagous Californian English to Shetlandish Scots, far from it.
Hardly. Swiss German and Standard High German are entirely different languages, despite what the name would lead you to think.
Quebec French is at most a dialect of French. There's as much different as there is between say RP English and Scottish English.
To be fair Scots was/is an actual language. Scottish English isn’t it but it certainly was heavily influenced by Scots. In all the three cases you’ve mentioned it’s a spectrum.
The distinction between a language and a dialect is not clear at all. e.g. while it wouldn’t be correct to call Swiss-German a dialect of standard German both languages are German Dialects.
> Quebec French is at most a dialect of French.
Yes it’s a dialect of French, it’s not a dialect or accent of standard French.
There is nothing special about Standard German or French besides the fact that they are dialects which have outcompeted all other dialects of those languages to a less or more successful degree due to entirely political and economical reasons.
""A language is a dialect with an army and a navy" is a phrase attributed to Max Weinreich, a Yiddish scholar and sociolinguist. Weinreich is said to have heard the phrase from an audience member at one of his lectures in the 1940s. "
Based on that definition Dutch also wouldn’t be a different language but a dialect within High German called Franconian.
Now try telling Dutch people that they don’t actually have their own language and are all speaking Low Country German and see what happens…
Most distinctions between dialects and languages are socio-political and not linguistic.
There is a similar continuum between North/Low German and Frisian. Yet you cross a border and just like Dutch/Franconian it’s no longer a dialect but a different language.
According to Wikipedia, Franconian is split between Low Franconian dialects, including Dutch, and the others, which underwent the same consonant shift as the High German languages. But I agree that the boundaries of languages are not purely linguistic.
I don't think you have that quite right. Alemannic does not include Standard High German. Alemannic is a group of High German dialects in the southwestern German-speaking areas.
>>The High German languages (German: hochdeutsche Mundarten, i.e. High German dialects), or simply High German (Hochdeutsch) – not to be confused with Standard High German which is commonly also called "High German"
I am not French but it is my mothertongue. In my country we just absolutely love the Quebecois accent, it's sounds really really nice and friendly :-).
It's a european thing, not just french. Same in other languages. People are highly attuned to accents and geographical differences they imply. It's frustrating as a non-native speaker. English is "neutral" ground. Americans too are in general really patient with other people's accents, so just less used to that sort of provincialism.
People from the US generally find accents from other English speaking countries fairly charming (source I'm from the US) rather than a source of amusement or derision. I think attitudes about accents from non-English speakers vary more widely and regionally.
Now that you say it: some decades ago there was a racist tendency in France where people where having fun of others accent.
They where having fun of the southern marseillais accent, but also of the northern ch'ti accent, they also had extra fun of African or Quebec's accent indeed.
I, as a child, did imitated those accent for fun. I now regret it, bit it's still in the roots of a lot of people.
I sometimes fear that racism is predominant in french society.
Actually, all French speakers for a very long time have mocked other accents, especially from France, therefore they have a kind of specialty of mocking themselves. Parisian have always mocked regional accents, every region was mocking other regional accents, and even accents from two cities 50 km apart are mocked from both sides. Other accents are just mocked the same as french people make fun of other french people regional accents.
I would say that the accent mocking in France is less about racism than about the structure of french society, which is extremely centralized historically, and regions have always been very defensive about their specificities, like the local dialects, languages and the accent is part of that. Some regional languages were even forbidden in some places not so long ago.
Racism in France being looked by the accent prism is a foreign worlview with a very low relevance level. It avoids the real and problematic issues of racism that exists.
But indeed there is a link: racism flourishes when you do not see or hear people different from yourself. This can happen everywhere and mocking other accents is just using one parameter to insulate your own social group from the rest of the world and diminish/blame/mock the others. If you live in a country where regional accents are not a thing, you will find another parameter and anyone can say through the prism of this local parameter that racism is worse in this country compared to another. My point here is that racism can be everywhere, and has first to be fought on its causes, because symptoms can be very different from places to places and fighting them might help, but not solve.
^ this. French people make fun of every accents. Racism and discrimination is about what society deem acceptable and what minorities or weaker communities we find OK to mistreat. I’d say discrimination in France is much worse than in America.
Without denying at all that racism exists, I believe it is also possible to imitate accents outside racism. I'm from the south of France, and my accent kicks in when I speak with elderly family members that themselves always have the southern accent when they speak. Despite that, sometimes I make jokes imitating the southern accent, does that make me a "self-racist"?
Clarification in case it's needed: I absolutely agree that making fun of someone's accent when they come to you is a best inappropriate, and more often than not utter bigotry. But I'm concerned about criminalising humour. This might not be a widely-shared idea (especially in the anglosaxon world?), but I even believe that racist jokes can be tools against racism, decredibilising racism and not actually oppressing the minority in question. Of course, again, context matters.
(clarification #2: I don't believe "cancel culture" is a thing, if you do racist jokes in the public sphere and someone calls you out for saying something racist, I don't believe anyone has been "cancelled")
Do you realize that, we are used to hear Quebec french only through singers and comedians you send us to France?
Send us serious people instead, and it will stop sounding funny.
I work at an international English speaking company. We all speak English.
I even talk to my colleges in the office English and we are not from/in an English speaking country.
Then there is our French site in Paris.
You write them a mail in English, they will answer in French. You chat them up in English they will answer in French.
They will hijack a group chat with +4000 people and just start writing in French. no f** given.
We wanted a English speaking technician on site. We got a choice.
We can get a person who speaks English or someone with technical skills,
but not both.
My experience is limited, but I understand where this stereotype is coming from.
A francophone friend of mine from New Brunswick (Quebec's neighbor - sizable Francophone and Franglais population) had a frustrating recent visit to Paris. Many locals switched to English after hearing her speak, and refused to move back to French even after she explained that it is her first language.
Fwiw my own experience in France, even in Paris, was mixed. A number of people refused to speak French with me (although my French was terrible, it's true), while others were either highly encouraging and complimentary, or were content to at least try and speak with me. I've never encountered anyone overtly rude.
I realised the "refusing to understand" attitude in French is not out of malice, but simply because the structure of French as a language is highly dependent on pronunciation. So pronouncing words slightly incorrectly either changes the meaning completely, or creates a situation where multiple different interpretations are possible.
I have one theory: Americans are much more social than French people and expect the French to be as receptive as them to small talk with strangers. But we don’t talk to strangers in France. We value our intimacy bubble and when someone talks to us out of nowhere we feel threatened. There are scripted scenarios for when strangers can interact: saying hi in the elevator is one example (and usually it doesn’t go further). Even the language with its formal pronoun is meant to add distance between you and people you don’t know.
There's a lot of nuance, socialising is a complex mixture of things which varies a lot between and also within country.
People coming with their home expectations and judging others based on it are often just seen as obnoxious and disrespectful from an outside point of view.
As an example, in France it's quite common to tease/gently mock people you're friend with. Some insults can even be used in a friendly way. This is something that doesn't fly AT ALL in a lot of places and, as a french, you have to be really careful with when meeting non-french. If not, you are just being super mean instead of trying to be friendly.
As well, the American way of using a lot of superlatives, being overly excited about things that are not that exciting can been seen as fake and disrespectful, in a lot of other places.
I think it has more to do with the success of the language standardization effort.
AFAIK being very serious about that was a declared goal historically; nation states in general not that old etc, etc..
So you have lots of people that went through a purposefully rigid process in education and of course with that through greater society. At the end there is maybe not much room / tolerance in handling deviations from the norm?
Despite all of that I’ve also seen this changing though as France / the world has become less insular (learning more foreign languages, etc).
> Speaking of English: I work in an international company since one year and am I the process of becoming fluent: native speakers are the hardest to understand for me. The easiest being the french, but surprisingly, a strong Italian or Moroccan accent isn't stopping me at all.
Interesting. I am not a native speaker either but I usually find french people the hardest to understand when speaking English. East coast Americans being the easiest.
I live just by the French border in Belgium (the dutch speaking part), I've been together with a girl from Paris for a couple of years and in a past life I was a waterski instructor for club med. So I've met my fair share of French people and I can tell you this is definitely a thing. Parisians even had this reputation amongst other French people. But I feel it's becoming a thing of the past as well. The younger generation seems less chauvinistic and more friendly in this regard.
I remember talking to a friend in Paris. I was talking in English about a trip to Disneyland I had planned. And this older man who was just passing by came to give me a rant in French of how an American theme park in Paris is just a disgrace and should be forbidden from ruining the superior French culture. Of course, this is just one anecdote, but I've got quite a few of those.
> I have more trouble understanding Indian, Australian than Americans, but it may be due that I watch a lot of American made content and am more used to their accent.
As an Australian who has lived in Europe you are not alone. I had to change the way I talked in order for non native english speakers to understand what I was saying. Australians tend to cut the end of the words off and mix vowel sounds e.g "dinner" gets pronouced as din-na.
I have a friend who grew up in Australia, who's from a state capital while I'm from the country, and he once said that I sounded "more Australian" on the phone to my family than I do while taking to cosmopolitan Australians. I think a lot of us subconsciously suppress our accents and vocabulary when we're not around the exact dialect we grew up with.
I do this too but I think it works a little differently. I would say that we unconsciously tailor the way we talk to align ourselves socially with others.
In the EU, especially EU administration, we have evolved a Euro-English dialect. It is mostly English, but with some typical European (French,
German, Italian and Greek mostly) pronounciations and phrasings.
Btw, Whisper has no trouble transcribing Euro-English, even with thick accents and very fast (Italian) delivery.
> "french are despising non native speakers, especially the Parisians"
I don't judge if this is right or wrong, but I lived in south west of Germany for a while, where they teach French starting in primary school.
Among the people there this is a common concept.
For whatever it is worth, I had actually good experiences in France including in Paris. Or, basically normal one, not really different from trying to get around Germany.
I suspect that French are unfriendly meme has taken life on its own. People complain when the French switches to English for them, they complain when the French speaks more slowly and simplifies the language, they complain when the French does not simplify for them.
So I'm British, work for a half-French company and have been to Paris quite a bit.
There's a recurring steotype that the French, and Parisians in particular, are dismissive of foreigners attempts to speak French if they aren't perfect, but it's not been my experience. My French coworkers are all cool of course, but even the poor baristas in Paris trying to understand my broken coffee order just tanked it and made an effort.
Indian English has to be one of the easiest accent/dialect to understand. The way we speak isn't much different than how a Spanish, French or Italian would speak English, a bit slowly and trying to emphasize each consonant as we want to get it right.
There is the Indian English you speak about, which I'm not sure I've experienced, and there's the Indian Helpdesk English that I know of, which is nigh-incomprehensible.
No, Indian English is absolutely horrible to understand (for me, Swedish). It just sounds all wrong and you use strange word selections pretty often.
The thing about accents is that they are easy to understand for people coming from languages with the same way or similar of speaking, ie french have an easier time understanding English spoken by a french than if it is spoken by an Indian. What I'm saying is not that one way or the other is superior, but that it is different for different people with different language baggages.
This can be used to make yourself easier to understand - change your accent to match the person you are talking with.
Pro-tip for everyone reading these comments: The "easiest", "clearest", "most neutral" accent is generally the one you're exposed to the most often (or the one spoken as a 2nd language by speakers of the language you're exposed to most often)
There is no universal metric of what makes one accent easier to understand than another.
I'm a native English speaker from the US midwest working as a software engineer.
For years, literally years, I thought my Indian coworkers, generally from Bangalore or Chennai, were using 'devil up' as a turn of phrase that had caught on in India but that I wasn't familiar with. Meaning something like 'come up with'.
> Indian English has to be one of the easiest accent/dialect to understand.
I don't find this to be true at all. Maybe it's not the hardest, but it's certainly not easy for me to understand Indian accents.
As an Indian myself, this has, variously, confused, amused and annoyed Indians speaking English to me. Unfortunately I don't speak a word of any Indian language myself.
> More precisely, the near 100% percent agreement on "french are despising non native speakers, especially the Parisians".
That’s what I read and hear everywhere, too. I find it very puzzling. I have visited Paris regularly since more than 20 years, sometimes for several months. I can’t remember even a single incident in all those years when I’ve felt despised or disrespected for my extremely rudimentary French language skills. Communication can be hard sometimes, but people are just as cooperative and helpful as anywhere else in the world.
HNEWS went woke a few years ago. and for the woke hivemind it is ok to be xenophobic toward french or other western nations. but you should treat over countries like you treat children you pretend to care about but in reality you still retain most of the colonial spirit of the left that wanted to go to africa to bring enlightenment to those people.
French people are proud that diverse countries and french dialects exist.
I'm from England and moved to france 3 years ago, I've bought a couple of cars, rented an apartment, gone through the healthcare system, put my kids into school, all while slowly learning french. No one has ever been rude to me about it.
The most common reaction I get is people embarresment about not knowing english better, even if they speak fluently.
As a non native English speaker, the hardest to understand are people from England. The easiest to understand are people from the NL. The most comfortable to work with: germans, italians, spaniards… since they make the same grammar mistakes I make (so we all understand our mistakes)
American here...always thought the NL/Dutch accent was weirdly the most American-like accent? Which I assume is universally fairly easy to understand because of all the media content? I've been around Dutch natives before where it took surprisingly long before realizing they weren't from the US.
In my opinion the Scottish accent is the most difficult accent to understand.
"Introduced" the Scottish accent via Youtube to some Mexican co-workers who are fluent English speakers and they freaked out. Will never forget one saying "WTF is this? How can this possibly be real?". Guy generally thought it was some sort of fake prank way of speaking and couldn't grasp that people actually spoke like that.
I'm American and concur with this. Aside from some slightly accented tweaks here and there, the Dutch speak a remarkably clear and rhotic English that feels quite comfortable to listen to.
It's odd because Dutch itself, being a Germanic language, has a lot of pronunciation commonality with the most conservative of all English accents, Scottish. You can hear it in this video, where a sentence composed of common Germanic words is spoken in every Germanic language:
The Dutch accent is closest to the American; if you didn't know English or Dutch, you would be hard pressed to tell the two apart. They sound a lot alike from a distance.
If it weren't for Trainspotting, which I adore, I'd be utterly useless at understanding Scots accents. As it is, I can just barely manage.
A coworker told me some years ago that understanding my broken English was easy for him, as he had worked extensively with other Spaniards and my grammar and pronunciation was just like them :)
Honestly, I'm regularly surprised by how nice and patient people from everywhere are, paying attention to my words even if my English is not, even today, as good as I would like it to be. Including French people. Including British people.
I'm surprised that we got the whole way through all these comments and nobody mentioned "L'Acadamie Francais" and the French laws enforcing proper use of the language, requiring a certain percentage of broadcast media to be in acadamie-sanctioned French. In my opinion, this is the cause of the international friction with other speakers. On the other hand, I've been to Paris and as long as I open with French and ask questions to the best of my ability, parisians have been very nice about adapting to my lack of ability.
So much misinformation on the article and in the comments...
1) The academy doesn't make laws, they just make recommendations that anyone is free to follow or ignore.
2) there are laws regarding the amount of french-spoken media being broadcasted but nothing is said about which word is accepted or not you can use as much foreign slang as you want.
3) the academy does not make an official dictionary. There is no official dictionary. There are multiple private entities editing dictionaries. These companies have their own authority on what makes it in the dictionary.
3) the academy suggest new words when none exist in French to avoid using too many English ones. Again it's perfectly fine to ignore them if you don't like them. Some works (eg logiciel for software) some don't (eg courriel for email).
Other french speaking nations have their own academy and that's also fine. There are no academy wars lol.
I'm also surprised at the reactions regarding Quebecers. Most french people are delighted to hear that accent. It's very rare to hear it in France. We are mostly used to accents from north and sub-saharian African regions, or bordering neighbors.
When I fist heard it I couldn't help but say I loved their accent. In a genuine, wholesome way... It is sad that it's often taken the wrong way.
Where did they get that map from? Burundi is French speaking, and member of the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie [1], and, just like DRC, used to be a colony of Belgium
Learning French while exploring West Africa was enormously good fun.
For most people it's their 3rd or 4th or 5th language, and they were always so full of joy and happiness than I was trying my best. Nobody ever corrected my pronunciation or criticized me for my bad grammar and lack of vocabulary. (Cough, France, Cough).
Thanks to all the encouragement and positivity I picked it up pretty quickly, and thoroughly enjoyed conversations with random locals all over the continent.
Actually, it was just as much fun as learning Spanish on the road in Central and South America.
> For most people it's their 3rd or 4th or 5th language, and they were always so full of joy and happiness than I was trying my best.
I think this is currently pretty typical in any language.
In my experience, Non-native speakers are much more resilient to strong accents and broken grammar. Probably because they passed themselves by this step.
I worked in a research laboratory with >100 nationalities: It was extremely common to be at a table with a Greek, a Spanish and a Chinese perfectly understanding each other in some "Globish English" while the British or Australian next chair were crying in tears.
I was (at one point) fairly conversational in French by US standards (was taking 300 level French conversation classes).
Did a fairly long trip in France, using as much French as I could. The speed of native French speakers meant comprehension was hard but manageable, and they seemed (almost intentionally at times), unable to make anything but what I would consider "travel French" work. I was fairly discouraged. I then met an Italian ski instructor who worked in France, and I could understand him quite well, and talked with him at a level (job, hobbies, family, reasons for travel) that I never achieved with a native speaker.
It was one of the most memorable moments of the trip and really gave me a feeling that we're all "citizens of the world" and not quite so divided by culture and lines on a map.
I am French, the oral French is very different from what is taught in books. There are a lot of transformations like 'je' to 'che' or 'il' to 'i' (from a French perspective). Also, many liaisons between words are pronounced but others are not, sometimes astonishingly to me, a guy born a long time ago in Brittany.
And young people learn to speak very quickly when they go to primary school (I don't know why).
Also there are lots of invented words by each generation like "wish" that you are ignorant if are not 10 years old.
I think that is common in Catalan, too. But, curiously, not so much with Castilian Spanish: almost every word I can think of is pronounced just like it is written, if you do it properly.
One of the hardest things tobadapt to: following conversation and discussions in French. In the beginning, I always was at least five sentences behind with my comprehension of what was said...
In Germany they were happy to see me trying, but almost universally couldn't understand any of my garbled sentences. I put it down to German being one of those languages where the order of words matters less and conjugation matters more for inferring context (and context is key to making any sense). Because I mis-conjugated a lot, it came across as garbled nonsense.
I've travelled a bit, and learning to speak Global English is definitely a skill. My German wife is more understandable to the average SE Asian than I am, despite me being a native speaker. She uses less $5 words, and simpler sentence construction than I do. It's interesting (and a little galling) seeing my perfectly-constructed sentence fail to make any headway, while her simple English is immediately understood.
And yes, at times I've definitely reacted with "I understood that, but holy crap that was bad English". Whatever works I guess.
Haha, it's funny we have had similar experiences. But I have been the German in this situation.
We had some designers from the UK and often out team members were struggling to understand them, and I had to reiterate their sentences in other terms, sometimes in bad English but that everyone understood. (A large part is also the British accent)
The fun thing about those experiences in professional settings is that the non-native speakers struggling with $5 words will liberally use $10 words ($50 words? I don't know how this is deals with inflation) that are part of the specific domain.
And trying to communicate clearly English to someone considerably more fluent in a Latin-derived language can even be an exercise in picking $10 and $50 words over the standard $5 ones because so much of our fancy vocabulary has common Latin roots
Opposite in my experience... English is my second language, I'm pretty fluent but I just can't understand strong accents.
I quit freelancing for a startup once because I missed half of their French English on meetings. Nowadays we have meetings with Mandarin Chinese and French and while a few of them have good English when others talk I give up.
Meanwhile with the same people native speakers from US and UK have no issues. I am amazed at how they can parse any gibberish thrown at them.
> Non-native speakers are much more resilient to strong accents and broken grammar. Probably because they passed themselves by this step
You just don't feel foreign language the way you feel own. Swearing in foreign language is just a word woth another meaning.
Not being bothered by bad grammar and what not is the same - butchered foreign language is not annoying nor more effort to understand. Butchered own language hurts ears the way foreign one does not.
That’s just partly true. While non-native speakers obviously recognize that something is a swear word, without immersion it’s often hard to gauge how it will be perceived by native speakers, simply because you don’t meet many, or any, to get reactions from.
I’m a non native speaker and it wasn’t until University when I met actual Americans that I realized my swearing could be ear-curling from time to time — I simply hadn’t noticed the reaction I got before in my life.
A simple example is the Swedish word “skit” and the English “shit”. In Swedish it’s actually pretty benign, for different reasons it’s not at all at the top of our swearing hierarchy: if you’d use “shit” in English in the same situations as you’d use “skit” in Swedish, English people will react.
So both in cases where there are cognates and a lack of actual experience with native speakers, there’s definitely a disconnect. I think any native speakers who have met good non native speakers have experienced this, they have 80-90% down but lack the cultural context (because where would it come from, movies isn’t enough)
As a Norwegian, we also have swear words that are not that bad. The problem is that the closest translation is often "fuck". So if you meet a Norwegian, don't be surprised if they drop the f-bomb frequently in business meetings. Many are not aware of the social context.
Yes yes. I English speak very easy. I English hear too very easy. Easy understand. Can talk each other good just simple words. English very good.
*Ahem*
Basically, the built-in error correction functionality in English is bloody phenomenal. Literally anyone with a passing understanding and skill in English can use it to communicate effectively. This feature is seldom seen in most other languages let alone lingua francas.
You are are literally describing a "lingua franca" here.
And there's no evidence that English is special in it's ability serve as a lingua franca. In previous eras, other languages held this role (e.g, French, hence the term "lingua franca").
The dominance of English can be far more certainly attributed to the geopolitical dominance of english-speaking nations...
Agree with your main point, but Lingua Franca doesn't refer to French but to "Mediterranean Lingua Franca", an actual trade language of its own which was a mix of a bunch of things. It had that name because it was "the language of the Frankish" (traders) but what they (eastern sea/Muslim traders) meant by "Franks" was any western European.
What evidence are you looking for? No despot on Earth has managed to stamp it out, unlike countless other languages. You can say things like lingua franca and everyone knows what you’re talking about. There aren’t any pronouns that depend on social status. It’s got a phonetic alphabet. It’s just a natural choice for commerce and knowledge-sharing.
You need to provide evidence that “built-in error correction functionality in English is bloody phenomenal” compared to other languages, because you can communicate with simple words and broken grammar just fine in every language I know.
> Yes yes. I English speak very easy. I English hear too very easy. Easy understand. Can talk each other good just simple words. English very good.
Pretty easy to “translate” that to a broken yet still understandable version of other languages.
Evidence? I was the one asking for evidence. I question the (very dubious) claim in the post I was responding to, that English is inherently suited to a role as a lingua franca.
Also, separately, your counterclaims are kind of... untrue? None of them are true of (e.g.) Mandarin which definitely served as a lingua franca for the ancient far east.
> No despot on Earth has managed to stamp it out, unlike countless other languages.
Any evidence of a language being stamped out by a despot?
> You can say things like lingua franca and everyone knows what you’re talking about.
Considering that the phrase is Latin, I am not sure what your point is.
> There aren’t any pronouns that depend on social status.
And many other quirks that are as alien to a native Japanese speaker than this is to you, however.
> It’s got a phonetic alphabet
What? Are we still talking about English here? FFS.
> It’s just a natural choice for commerce and knowledge-sharing.
It’s really not. Like all languages that ended up in similar situation (e.g. French, Arabic, Mandarin, or Latin), it is a combination of good old fashioned imperialism and commercial links.
> Any evidence of a language being stamped out by a despot?
Brazil had a couple of instances of that. In the 18th century, the Marquis of Pombal implemented a program to extinguish usage of Tupi as the national language and replace it with Portuguese. That was successful. And then a second iteration when the Italian, German and Japanese communities of speakers in South Brazil were prevented from speaking their languages around the time of World War 2. This was successful too.
Police document declaring it illegal to speak German, Italian and Japanese in public:
> Any evidence of a language being stamped out by a despot?
Oh the irony!
The English tried to wipe out Gaelic use in Cornwall, Scotland, the Isle of Man and Ireland for centuries. Schools were told to punish children for speaking Gaelic, and to only speak English to their students. We succeeded in wiping out Cornish as a living language (sorry!). Manx and Irish Gaelic survived, though you can argue about Manx Gaelic (there was a revival around the time the last native speaker died).
Quite the opposite, English has been the source of many such pressures, e.g. post Norman invasion, but it simply adapted in borg-like fashion to redefine what English was; retaining some of the previous language and moulding itself to fit in some of the new language.
Rather than rigidly fight against new influence, it took new words while retaining some of it's own. It does this constantly.
Even Chaucer's English is difficult to decipher for a modern English speaker, and that isn't even that old.
> Quite the opposite, English has been the source of many such pressures, e.g. post Norman invasion, but it simply adapted in borg-like fashion to redefine what English was
What you are describing is the standard process by which languages change. It's not accurate to equate this with the systematic elimination of a linguistic group through ethnic cleansing, something which English has never experienced.
English actually has terrible "error correction" on account of extensively using word order to indicate grammatical constructs, rather than inflection. You move the order of words around and it gets an entirely different meaning.
Plus its orthography is ridiculously inconsistent, and a learner is never sure if they've got the right pronunciation when looking at a word because it's been caked over with N layers of different systems (Anglo-Saxon + Norse +
Norman French + Latin + Greek etc)
I'll take a guess. It's been a while since I've looked for ally at another language. But English has fewer cases of verbs, and a more rigid sentence structure.
We have more special cases of past tense verbs and weird pronunciation, but I think it's easier to duck up and still make sense in English? Maybe.
English famously has relatively complex verb conjugation. What we don't have are cases (only a few words decline). German has cases for example, but much simpler verb conjugation.
I think I was being vague in my terminology. I wanted to say more broadly that German verbs are generally simpler than English ones because there are fewer tenses and aspects. There are however a greater number of strong verbs in German than in English.
I'm not familiar enough with German to evaluate. But when I think of Spanish, you've got 6 conjugations for every tense, and a whole bunch of different tenses. That makes for many dozens of different inflections, just for verbs.
English does have a rich ecosystem of compound verbs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_verb), but if this is taken to be part of the complexity of English verbs, I don't know how this stacks up to other languages.
English is mostly unique in its vocabulary size. We have redundant words for nearly every concept. We often shift registers by using different vocab--Latin-origin words for more formal/respectable registers. The ability to speak it in broken fashion and be understood is not unique.
many languages have this feature. For example Russian or German. You can put in the words, with most words missing, in any order and somehow someone will get it. France cant do this. Why... I dont know why. Maybe because the are more desciptive.
Russian is a heavily inflected language, so the order of words matters less. For example, in English you can say "the cat ate the bird", but if you reversed "cat" and "bird" this would be a different sentence entirely. In Russian "cat" would have the nominative case and "bird" accusative, so you can swap the words around and it would mean the same, though perhaps with different emphasis.
French doesn't do this; as with English only the pronouns have vestigial accusative, and in any case most inflections are lost in speech because French drops consonants from the end of words. So you have to depend on strict word order to preserve meaning.
> France cant do this. Why... I dont know why. Maybe because the are more desciptive.
Oui oui. Je français parle très bien. Je entends français très bien aussi. Facile comprendre. Peux parler entre nous très bien juste mots simples. Français très bon.
Is just as understandable as the English original. French is much more forgiving than German in that regard, with a more flexible sentence structure. German and Russian the advantage of declension, which is a redundancy mechanism to indicate the role of a noun, but it’s an advantage over English just as much as over French. Also, it’s something a non-native will get wrong most of the time initially, so it’s not really helpful to help understand broken German.
Basically, I don’t think this is right and I tend to agree to “ many languages have this feature”, although I would say “most”.
French people always get criticized for not understanding foreigners' broken French. It is not out of malice. It is because it actually is very hard to understand broken French.
A lot of very different words sound similar. A very simple grammatical mistake can completely change the meaning of a sentence.
And yeah, it's probably kind of the same in English, but French is not the linga franca English is today (see what I did there!). While we get a ton of daily practice reading/hearing broken English, it is not the same with French for people living in France.
People weren't correcting you to mock you. They wanted to understand and probably help you.
> People weren't correcting you to mock you. They wanted to understand and probably help you
I'm (an anglophone) from Quebec and worked in Europe for a while. Parisians totally mock people not speaking Parisian French. They're even open and extraordinarily condescending about it. The rest of the country is cool and generally helpful
I am French .. and yes people in Paris are rude. Thats the running joke in France that nobody likes them. If the dont work there they invade the rest of france and remember us how annoying they are.
And yes the rest of France is awesome and totaly helpfull and nice to strangers.
Also that Parisians treat them like a backwater colony. That really doesn't sit well with the narrative that Quebec was always an independent people who were only ever under colonial rule after the evil English came along. Oh, and there were never any issues with the natives until the Brits.
You'd be surprised. Though I think you've misunderstood the parent's comment. THe parent doesn't literally mean that they think of Quebec as a colony.
He means that they look down upon Quebec people, as if they are "ploucs" [from some backwater colony], without their French "sophistication" and accent.
All my teachers in French throughout middle school and university (Canada) were France French. In college, my first TA was Quebecois French & it took me a few classes before I actually started understanding what she was saying. It’s a very difficult accent and I don’t think it’s a snobbery thing - just requires extended exposure. By comparison Quebecois seem to more easily understand France French whether it’s because there’s more exposure through media or whatnot.
There’s a similar effect in the maritime with English btw - there’s plenty of North American, Australian, New Zealand, Irish, Scottish etc accents that can be difficult to understand even though they are native speakers.
To me, taking offense that someone doesn’t understand your accent is similar to someone who makes fun of someone else for their accent. It says more about you than the other person.
I agree, but no one is being offended by a frustrating but understandable "sorry I didn't catch you, can you please repeat?". It's very specific, very condescending fun which I've witnessed. Being Italian-Canadian anglophone from Montreal my French accent is very unique - mix of American and Italian and it usually sparks good conversation because they want to know where did this come from? My friends who are Quebecois, on the other hand, are subjected to all manner of mean-spirited ridicule, from the innocuous "aww you're so cute too down like that!" to "you must miss your moose blood when you visit"
I studied French French in school and eventually got to a point where I could follow along a bit to TV or music and have simple conversations. I remember Quebecois French being totally incomprehensible to me, though.
> French people always get criticized for not understanding foreigners' broken French. It is not out of malice. It is because it actually is very hard to understand broken French.
Here's an anecdote that suggests it is nothing but malice in Paris.
My partner's mother is from France (not Paris) and extremely French. Has worked decades as a professor of French language. You'll have a hard time finding someone more proper in strict French language than her.
And yet, in Paris she is mocked for "not speaking French" and they pretend to not understand her even though her French is as perfect as it gets. It's just malice, if you're not a local.
I’m from Southern France but I have lived in Paris for a few years. I didn’t have a strong accent that would require subtitles on French TV like some people do, but I did have an accent. Nobody would mistake me for a local.
I think people over there are generally condescending and don’t care about you. I don’t think the accent is the issue. If not that they would find something else to complain about.
I was occasionally mocked for my accent but nothing that a stare and raising of my voice would not fix. Maybe staff is more likely to mess with a woman?
Anyway. Almost nobody is a local in Paris. People from all over France come there. They erase their accent and all pretend to be Parisians after a few years. Then they age and go back home to retire or raise a family in an affordable place.
These days I travel with my wife and switch from perfect English to perfect French and I get a bit of shock from the staff when this occurs. Nobody complains about my accent anymore, relieved they won’t have to deal with English for once. I must have a fairly weird and impossible to geographically locate accent nowadays after years of living abroad and speaking to expats. I’m no longer sounding like the caricature of the peasant from Southern France. Also my wife is a lot more friendly than me and generally would befriend staff members that can speak good English (foreigners or students) so I guess that helps.
> French people always get criticized for not understanding foreigners' broken French
The main criticism I've heard is kind of the opposite - that they dislike foreigners not trying to speak French, and just starting communication in English. If both of these are true then I guess that puts foreigners in a tough place where they're damned if they try and damned if they don't?
I’ve had extraordinary luck with broken French in France. If you start in French and do your best, a lot of people suddenly speak fluent English. Especially in metro areas.
But the experience does not compare to traveling with my partner who speaks fluent zero-accent French. Paris turns into a different much nicer city when you pair with a native speaker.
That said, you’ll never get the level of service you see in USA. The French (Europe in general) just don’t care that much about customer UX. You either do it their way or you can leave.
> The French (Europe in general) just don’t care that much about customer UX. You either do it their way or you can leave.
I think Europe partly just has different preferences around service. We tend to find American servers annoyingly fake, and to be constantly needlessly interrupting us to ask if we need anything. And of course, one should also take into account the experience of being a server.
Having had a date night in Manhattan in a fairly expensive and good restaurant, some time during the first few courses, we had to have a few words with the maître d’ - just to get the wait staff to stop bugging us if we wanted ketchup or whatever - and to observe the language of cutlery as to when we were finished a course. Once explained how we’d like it, we got top-notch European style discreet service and a far less interrupted conversation. A gentle twist of the head got the wine waiter refilling our glasses rather than butting in. It’s possible!
As an example of this: Americans tend to expect plates being picked up as soon as one is finished eating, even when others on the same table are not finished yet. In my native Netherlands this would be considered (very) rude, with plates only removed after everyone is finished and then some grace period. Picking up plates early here indicates the restaurant wants you out the door quickly.
Europe as a whole has always come off as unpleasant to visit as an American, from what I've read online such as this thread. In no American city I've been to do you have to be so vigilant for pickpockets as you apparently do in European cities, and virtually no one in America will complain about your accent or grammar. We have free water at restaurants, and the staff won't treat you like a mooch for asking about it; in fact most staff of any business will make at least a basic attempt to be pleasant towards you. You get your money's worth in food portions at restaurants, the taxes are cheaper, you won't be arrested and fined for making a rude tweet.. why exactly would I want to visit Europe?
You have been piled on a lot already in this thread but let me add my 2 cents:
- you don’t have to be particularly careful about pickpockets anywhere in Europe, at least not more than anywhere else in the world.
- you always get free tapwater in restaurants if you ask for it anywhere in Europe, also most waiters are also generally pleasant (of course there can be unpleasant people anywhere)
- not sure about the tax thing (why would you care about that as visitor anyway?) - atleast we have free healthcare and free university shrug
- haven’t heard from anyone that got arrested for a „rude“ tweet lolwhat
You don’t have to visit of course but it would surely expand your horizon.
When I visited the US for the first time I realised that most of the prejudices against Americans weren’t true (that most Americans are fat, stupid and greedy for example - sure a lot of them are but not the majority)
The thing about Europe is that it's large and diverse, you can't generalize by saying "in Europe".
There are a lot of pickpockets in Paris, I've never been victim of it but I've witnessed it several time. Never saw that in the 5 years I lived in Tokyo or the 3 years I lived in SF.
You always get free tapwater in France (that's the law) but not in Poland.
I agree in that I would recommend anyone to visit Europe - even European should visit other European countries! But it's important to remember that Europe is made of several very, very different countries.
This is all true. You also can ask for ice with your coke. This will endear you with the wait staff as they can not resist snickering and muttering “American ..”
In the US I always had to specifically ask to not have ice in my drinks.
That was one thing I could never wrap my head around.
The other thing was the extreme use of AC. I can understand AC to an extent, but they were making it so cold I had to bring extra clothes just to go in the supermarket for example - what the heck?!
It's a matter of cultural differences and expectations. Only American cities are like American cities. If you travel anywhere else expecting everything to be just like America you'll be hugely dissapointed.
To see stuff? US doesen't really have that have much besides nature worth seeing/experiencing from a traditional tourist perspective. Almost all the cities besides a handful are extremely boring in comparison (and in those worth visiting like SF you're very likely to get stabbed by a drug addict or even shot)*.
To be honest besides not having free water in restaurants (if I have to ask it's already not free (emotionally)) none of those other things you've mentioned seem like a big deal for me.
> vigilant for pickpockets
In some places? Sure. But IMHO even in notorious cities like Barcelona it's not really that bad.
* well that's certainly not true.. but if you base your opinion on what some Europeans might be saying on Reddit/etc. you might end up believing stuff like this.
I'm sorry but the staff at American restaurants is extremely overbearing and come across as endlessly annoying. I can ask for water or extra dishes if I need them.
The necessity for tips is visible from a mile away.
When visiting Europe I've literally had to get up and find my waitress after not seeing her for 40+ minutes. I'll take tip culture any day...in sit down restaurants, at least.
That’s okay, we don’t want you. I lived the first 28 years of my life in the downtown historic area of an increasingly touristy European capital and American tourists were always the worst :)
The Chinese tourists can be frustrating because they travel in tight packs and take up a lot of room, but at least they understand they’re not visiting an amusement park and are not the center of the world.
My favorite were always fellow European high school and college kids traveling in small groups. You’d never even realize they were tourists if not for the oversized backpacks. They just blend in, aren’t loud, respect the locals, and seek authentic experiences.
Have you actually been to Europe? Paris/London has a few pickpockets problem but nothing come close to the violence in the states. And you can’t win when it comes to food. Most US food is garbage unless you are paying top dollars.
My last trip to Paris was 1 year ago and it was pretty bad compared to NYC, Los Angeles, and San Francisco for the average tourist - especially at night.
I live in the Paris area (initially came as a tourist) and I've visited San Francisco. It's all a matter of where exactly you are - there are bad parts and good parts. However, the worst parts of San Francisco were definitely worse than the worst parts of Paris (where no tourist has any reason to come close to, unlike in SF where it's literally a few blocks away from major tourist attractions).
You don't see people shooting heroin literally 5 metres away from a tourist attraction in Paris (for the record - right next to the queue of tourists to get on the cable car at Powell/Market stop).
As an almost life long New Yorker it pains me, truly, to read this. People used to fear this city and that kept the “average tourist” (which includes super lovely people like my parents btw) well away from the Big Apple. Oh how I miss those days. Now any average tourist feels perfectly safe in our city and no longer fears us locals. This is not good. It’s almost like being colonized, like what happened to those poor poor Barceloni. One day they had a beautiful city (though it did smell like dog shit everywhere) and before you know it they lost it to the tourists. I fear this has already happened to Manhattan, though over here in Brooklyn we do our bit to instill the necessary respect for locals and their customs for the tourists. (Yes they come over here and look at graffiti on the wall to the great amusement of us locals.)
From personal experience, most large French cities (Toulouse, Lyon...) have higher QoL than Paris, for much lower prices. Would not be surprised if this is also true for London/rest of UK, perhaps other countries as well.
Had a friend say the same was similar for Amsterdam vs other cities (eg Eindhoven) in the Netherlands
Even in the US, it's probably easier to have a nice life on a reasonable budget in someplace like Denver or St Louis than in NYC or Washington DC. Capitals tend to expensive, crowded and loud.
I live in Europe and have never been stolen from, and I‘ve been on plenty vacations abroad. And in many places you do get free tap water (eg London or Vienna) with food. IDK why you would care about the price of tap water though since that’s probably 0,1% of your traveling budget for a city trip.
Taxes are country specific, you‘ll find some EU countries with lower taxation than your average US state, eg Bulgaria.
Being rude on Twitter won’t land you in jail, please.
Because I have to ask and unless I'm explicit they'll bring a 330 mL glass bottle which is extremely annoying. That forces me to drink beer all the time just to avoid that which is not exactly ideal.
> eg Bulgaria
The VAT there is 20% which is much higher than any place in the US.
This trope about the risk of being shot by police in the US is kind of dumb. Yes police shoot about 1,000 people here a year, but on average only 50 are unarmed. And among those where data is available the number where the unarmed person wasn’t attacking the officer with their bare hands boils down to basically the cases you’ve seen in the news. I can think of exactly 2 foreign nationals who have been shot while unarmed by US police.
We have some real problems with policing here, but as a foreign tourist you’re more likely to die in a plane crash getting here than to be shot by the police.
>This trope about the risk of being shot by police in the US is kind of dumb. Yes police shoot about 1,000 people here a year, but on average only 50 are unarmed.
This makes it even worse... Since those armed people can also shoot you.
In constrast the German police kills about 10 people a year, which given the population would amount to the US police killing 45 people total (so 5% that of the US). France, the worst example, the analogy would amount to about 250 per year (so 25% that of the US).
For homicides, Germany had 260 in 2026. That would amount to 1135 projected to the US population difference. France (again a worst case) has 734 per year. In US terms that would be equal to the US having 3772 per year. Adjusted for population, the US has around 5x the number of France and 16x the number of homicides Germany has. Other western european countries are much lower.
> This makes it even worse... Since those armed people can also shoot you.
In theory, but reality fewer than 10% of all homicides are committed by someone who is a stranger to the victim. Of those, about half are the result of an argument that escalates to violence. You're exceedingly unlikely to be the victim of any violence as a tourist in almost any part of the US that a European might visit.
I don't think it was a good way to make the point though. And at least in the UK, they arrested, prosecuted, and convicted 567 people in 2017-2018 alone for violations of the Communications Act of 2003[1]. The convictions mostly seem to be for Tweets and Facebook messages.
> That said, you’ll never get the level of service you see in USA. The French (Europe in general) just don’t care that much about customer UX. You either do it their way or you can leave.
I hate service in American restaurants. I don’t want to be babysit and have someone always behind me. I can fill my glass myself just fine, and I am able to call if I need something. I just want to be left alone to enjoy the meal and company without being watched. That said, Paris tends to be a caricature of a different kind, sure.
hahaha .. I have to lough hard. That is so True. Many people in paris speak english but the only way to get them to speak it is by speaking bad french. And they hate you for that.
When I was a little kid my school took me on a trip to paris. I got lost and tried to ask for directions. The locals literally ignored me as I was begging for help. Until I finally remembered my parents talking about how the french hate anyone who doesn't speak their language and I started my plea with "I'm sorry I don't speak your beautiful language"
So yeah, they'd rather ignore a lost child than tolerate foreigners not knowing their "beautiful" language.
ex-Parisian here (or perhaps Parisian in exile, I'll always be Parisian in my heart, but I refuse to live in the city while it's under the tyrannical mismanagement of Anne Hidalgo)
We're nice to each other. The local social codes are perhaps not as obvious to visitors, but if you put some effort into befriending the city, Paris can be very kind.
Agree with the whole "Parisians ignoring people" thing though.
If you're running late for an appointment and you see hundreds of thousands of people per day, you don't really differentiate between a lost tourist and yet another bum asking for spare change to buy beer and drugs with.
I don't have a lot of experience with huge cities, thankfully. Paris is around ten million people, right? Are other big cities this rude to strangers?
I can think of a few examples: Jakarta, Ho Chi Minh, and Bangkok, where I found people quite friendly, and London, where people are close to but not quite as unfriendly as Paris. But that's the extent of my experience.
> The main criticism I've heard is kind of the opposite - that they dislike foreigners not trying to speak French, and just starting communication in English.
That’s the case most often, and that’s what most of my friends who lived in Paris say. There’s a (not entirely justified) pervasive feeling that French people can’t speak English properly and they tend to be self-conscious about it.
> If both of these are true then I guess that puts foreigners in a tough place where they're damned if they try and damned if they don't?
It’s different people. Most of them are forgiving, if clumsy, and a few of them are pricks. Just like in any country. A fair few don’t care and you can live perfectly well near Paris for years speaking only a handful of French words.
This is true in every touristic place, not just in France. Many people will get annoyed by tourists who don't even try to say "hello" or "thank you" in the country they're visiting. And they don't even make a majority but you'll more easily remember the one bad experience you had than all the good one.
However I don't think that it's common for French people to critized foreigner's French. On the contrary, they're very supportive of people trying to speak their language.
I'm sure you can find some people who would critize foreigners' bad French but probably not more than any other country.
Jeez, aren't you seeing what everyone writes here?
Learning is not being "illiterate". It means trying to become literate and shows intention. Being impolite in response to use of such non-perfect use of language is rude at least and that's what everyone says here.
... and my anectodital experience:
My wife was learning French for 4+ years, probably in not hightest quality high school in Poland - no good practice unfortunately, but good intentions.
Exhibit 1.
Husband of my sister in law when She tried to be polite and start friendly chat "her-broken-French". Response: don't talk to me, better switch to English ...
(this guy is authistic anyway, so let's drop this sample)
Exhibit 2
Month in France travelling by train. It was much more easier for me to find someone speaking English (my English wasn't good back then too), than for her to find someone to speak with her French. I mean typical dialogs: train station, tickets, tourist info or grocery.
She gave up after week and we switched to me managing dialogs with French people in English.
Yes, her French was probably not too good or even bad, but how for Christs sake was she supposed to improve it? I guess practice is agreed to be best way to do it?
To be clear, I wasn't suggesting locals are obligated to do anything. I'm just pointing out tourists seem to have difficulty in more than one direction.
Yes, I'm French and I often have a hard time understanding French even correct, with a strong accent I'm not used to. I remember, when I was ~15 I met a guy from RDC (Congo) and it was very awkward for me as he was speaking French with a Belgian and African accent which even with all the best intent I could not understand, while he understood me just fine. We ended up speaking in English (it was in London so I pretended wanting to improve my English :))
I have noticed that advanced mono lingual speakers (ie with higher education or some experience analyzing language) are aware of a huge amount of nuance and meaning in their language encoded in small inflections or grammar. They are thus not always good at narrowing down to the simple thing the accented foreigner is trying to say.
It seems to require some 2nd language learning experience to realize “the 2nd language speaker is probably not advanced enough to know rare idiom X, therefore he probably means much more common idiom Y but has the grammar off.”
This reminds me of the early years of Mixed Martial Arts where you had lots of Brazilian second language speakers interacting with guys with journalism degrees in MMA journalism at the time who weren’t aware how confusing they sounded using American sports idiom after American sports idiom and the Brazilians would just do their best trying to make sense of what they’re being asked
> It is because it actually is very hard to understand broken French.
Is there any evidence that French has some unique qualities that render it unusually difficult to understand when not spoken by a someone fluent in the language? I’m reasonably competent in French and if there is such a feature, I don’t see it.
I speak fluent german and french. And I think yes. French has way less words then german or english. And for many things we dont have words but more desciptions. And french feeles more compressed in the sense that I cant take any word out of the sentence without taking the sense away. In english and German broken sentences still make sense if the context is given.
And some words to Paris. Yes people there are rude! But you have to understand that most People in France live there and WORK there. They give a fuck about tourism because there is so much other work there the town could skip on it. Thats why they are anoid by tourists. They go to work and some people ask them for things they dont care because they have to go to work. Paris is a dream in Summertime because so many people leave Paris because of summer vacations that it is totaly empty.
And yes American tourists are something special. You can see them 100meter away beeing confused why Paris is building houses in such an old fashioned way.
No, I don't think so. In my experience of traveling around and trying to speak various languages in a broken fashion, the biggest difficulty is the native's receptivity to trying to understand you. The second biggest difficulty is ease of basic pronunciations, and this does vary a lot between languages. For example, currently I'm in Vietnam, and local people do not try to understand foreigners who speak Vietnamese at all. By locals, I mean people I meet around during the day like shopkeepers and service people rather than my friends. The pronunciation is also extremely difficult because of the tones and the very large difference in regional accents. It's frustrating and I have given up trying to learn the language because of this.
I would accept that France is slightly harder to pronounce than English but as a beginner/intermediate French speaker I don't personally believe it.
However, I definitely agree that people in France - especially Paris - are not receptive to foreigners speaking French at all. They don't support you, and you do feel looked down on for speaking badly (in comparison to Vietnam where you will never feel looked down on, you'll just receive looks of confusion). Again, I don't mean friends that you make. I mean the general French populace that you meet while going about your daily business, in shops, restaurants, and so on.
Spain, Italy, Greece are similar to France in that they are condescending towards non-native speakers. Mainland Greece was the worst for me. Meanwhile I would say that Portugal, Indonesia, Germany, and many English speaking countries (at least in cities) are quite helpful and friendly towards non-native speakers. Of course, I only have my own limited experience to go on so I may be wrong.
Like the sibling, I haven't found Spain too bad for this. Waiters and other service staff sometimes switch to English on me despite my Spanish being perfectly serviceable for that sort of interaction, but no-one's ever been rude to me about it. One waitress apologised when I said that I like to practice my Spanish, but explained that she also wanted to practice her English. I suspect that's quite a common dynamic.
One thing I've found is that fleeting interactions in shops and restaurants are a terrible way of practicing a language. I can have a full conversation with a Spanish person without too much difficulty, but I still find shops and restaurants quite challenging situations. So, don't go on holiday to practice language X. Pay $15 for a one hour online conversation class.
>Spain, Italy, Greece are similar to France in that they are condescending towards non-native speakers.
I've spent quite a lot of time in Spain and I've never felt that but it's possible that I just didn't notice. The same in Italy although I've only spent 3 or 4 weeks there in total. However it has never occurred to me to think of Paris as unfriendly either which seems to contradict the experience of most other people, so maybe I'm just oblivious to that sort of thing.
> Is there any evidence that French has some unique qualities that render it unusually difficult to understand when not spoken by a someone fluent in the language?
Usually it’s just English exceptionalism and the centuries-old rivalry between both countries. Don’t expect much objectivity from either side. From Americans, it’s usually ignorance of a foreign language. Spanish-speaking Americans don’t tend to say this sort of thing.
> I’m reasonably competent in French and if there is such a feature, I don’t see it.
I remember being at a bar in the 18th, and asking for "L'Eau". "Quoi?" "L'eau sil vous plait?" ..... long pause ..... I motion to picking up a glass and drinking it ..... "Ahhhh! DE L'eau!"
Well, maybe he was an asshole, but in his defence articles are much less optional in French than in English, thus you don't expect it standalone. It basically becomes one word in your consciousness. A bit like if someone asks you for "ater". And when you finally understand, you feel really stupid, because yes ultimately it was just missing a useless article, but it just didn't click.
Sounds like you're asking to talk to a girl named Lola, diminutive Lo. And the guy is like wondering if he remembers someone at the bar with that name or if he misheard you.
But after he sees your hand gestuals, the meaning of your needs becomes clear. French and Italians are familiar with waiving hands and making facial expressions to accompany their words, so keep doing it, and be patient until your language skills improve. My first trips in Britain as a teenager, no one could understand me asking where the bathroom is (French is my mother tongue). Now that's not a fun one to use gestuals for. In time I got to learn about the John, loo.
But hey, it's the fun about traveling in foreign land!
Interestingly, I could not help but notice that, being neighbors and all, both the English and the French are by far the worst offenders in terms of how broken one's pronunciation of the language of the other usually is.
while 1/2 of french is imported and mangled latin. so where did english borrow from really? given that it’s easier to figure out the latin roots of the anglicized?
I'm not sure what 400 years of Norman political control really means. There was an invasion of England in 1066 by William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, which ended up with King William I of England. Subsequent monarchs of England/bits of France were no longer Normans per se. At least one variety of a French language at the time was introduced, wholesale, and became the court language of England. Latin of course remained the really "important" language of the Church and increasingly the law.
There are roughly three named "ages" of English (in England): old, middle and modern. I can just about understand written middle English and have severe problems with old English.
Modern English can be very flexible, which is probably why it has become popular as a lingua franca. There are no real noun genders. Word order can be fiddled with mercilessly too. Officially, English sentences are subject - verb - object (SVO) for example: "I sat on the bed". You can say "I the bed sat on" or "On the bed sat I" or "sat I on the bed" and it still works fine. Most of those variants are regionally correct, somewhere.
English spelling is an absolute nightmare! Linking pronunciation to spelling is absolutely awful. I can completely understand English as a second language speakers throwing their hands up in the air and declaring the whole thing as complete bollocks! However, that means that we are extraordinarily tolerent of speling mistaks. field or feild? sealed or ceiled? Who nose!
> There was an invasion of England in 1066 by William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, which ended up with King William I of England. Subsequent monarchs of England/bits of France were no longer Normans per se. At least one variety of a French language at the time was introduced, wholesale, and became the court language of England.
There was more than that. For a while, England was a backwater of the Angevin empire and kings of England were native French speakers for quite a long time.
> Modern English can be very flexible, which is probably why it has become popular as a lingua franca.
You have the causality backwards here.
> Word order can be fiddled with mercilessly too. Officially, English sentences are subject - verb - object (SVO) for example: "I sat on the bed". You can say "I the bed sat on" or "On the bed sat I" or "sat I on the bed" and it still works fine.
the rare forms/orders are allowed for the purposes of literature and other forms of art. the grammar of the modern english language and its gradual adoption through intellectual training was intentionally done. it was necessary in order to (1) elevate english to the level of latin and french, and hence (2) be a suitable tool for both art and intellectual writings. that was the only way it could unseat french and become the dominant language fit for all purposes.
how did the normand invasion change the language? is there a study you could reference? did they influence the structure of the language itself or their language became a source of loan words? or what really happened?
That seems like a rather high amount. According to the statistics from Wikipedia it's more like 40-45% of all loanwords, of which French admittedly has quite a few. Crucially, the vocabulary that makes up its grammatical core is overwhelmingly of Romance origin.
what makes a language isn’t the core vocabulary but, crucially, the syntax structure. when you say ‘je suis malade’ instead of ‘suis malade’ that’s the germanic roots of french mandating the structure. latin loan words don’t make a language romantic.
French is indeed a notable exception in that regard. However, the rest of the grammar structure is still overwhelmingly of Romance origin. This and some other odd things can indeed be explained because of the ancient Franks picking up the language of the people they ruled over, but incompletely so.
so i’m fairly familiar with latin’s grammar because i speak it, proficiently. first, there’s material difference between latin and modern french grammars. for example, the genetive, dative, ablative, accusative noun cases have been largely replaced with the nominative case + prepositions, which makes them no different from the (ultra-)modern german or english language. both german and english have conjugations too.
* i say ultra because proper german has more cases than french in fact.
This has happened in quite similar ways to most other Romance languages as well though. Almost all of them (with Romanian being a notable exception) have gotten rid of their case system and only the pronouns contain traces of it. Nowadays, they express the "cases" with prepositions too.
agreed. so given that french grammar bears striking resemblance to german/english, and given that they’re all info-european languages, why are we quick to reject the germanic roots of the french language and classify it as romance? here i don’t know much history but i won’t be surprised if we learn that the association was deliberate, in order to elevate french to the status of latin? i.e. language fit for intellectual work?
Good that you brought up English, which is also frequently argued to actually be a Romance language and where it is much more ambiguous. Since it actually acquired a massive amount of latin loan words directly and via medieval or modern French. Sometimes the same word twice or thrice.
The classification as Romance vs. Germanic is based on two important observations:
I. Even considering the Germanic influence, French and its close relatives are still more similar to each other and to the other Romance languages. If I see a page of French text, my knowledge of German is almost useless, but my Italian gets me very far. This classification can be made objectively by using Swadesh lists[0] or related tools.
II. We can trace its historical development very well and it seems to organically emerge from the vulgar Latin of late antiquity.
Of course the association with Latin was deliberate, but this happened much earlier when the Romans conquered, colonized, and eventually romanized Gaul. Because of this, there was simply never a need for loaning words from Latin on a large scale. Later, the Franks were just a new management that placed itself on top of the existing culture.
incidentally my latin helps me very little in french but a lot in italian and spanish, for example. in fact, i studied latin to make my task of learning french easier—but that never happened. i picked up habits and rules that produce outrightly wrong and nonsensical french.
on french being vulgar latin, i agree. but bear in mind that the vulgar latin spoken in the provinces are akin to creole (and other patois/pidgin dialects) of modern mainstream languages: they’re amalgamations of many languages, the mainstream languages furnishing words and phrases where necessary. barely do they supply grammar. that said french, unlike other romance languages, demonstrates a strong germanic syntax structure, which has persisted over centuries of iterations of the language. the overwhelming evidence suggests that french is germanic (both in syntax structure and vocabulary). it’s incorrect to assume that spanish and italian, for example, are pro-drop when in latin the so-called pro-drop is the default. intelligisne? is what you ask your interlocutor, not tu intelligsne? in french an explicit subject is required, without which the sentence is nonsensical and grammatically incorrect.
french is arguably romance but it is germanic too, and in no small way.
Yeah, I made them same observation when I tried to pick up Latin while learning Italian. It really doesn't make sense to multitask these, unless one is interested in learning both. Even though they are related, it's not necessarily of help when learning it.
Nobody is denying that French has Germanic influence. And it probably encouraged its highly divergent evolution from its relatives. The neighboring Picard language is a lot more conservative for example.
Please compare the following paragraph to its translation into German, Norwegian, and Italian. That should really settle the discussion. From the Wikipedia article about Christmas. My estimation is that like 95% of these words are of Romance origin:
> Noël est la fête chrétienne qui célèbre la Nativité, c'est-à-dire la célébration qui rappelle la naissance de Jésus-Christ. La fête de Noël vient peu de temps après le solstice d'hiver boréal auquel elle est associée (voir ci-bas). La déchristianisation faisant, la fête de Noël est aujourd'hui coupée de son fondement religieux dans de nombreux pays occidentaux, mais elle y subsiste comme fête traditionnelle.
French syntax structure is mostly in line with the other romance languages, with the very notable exception of not being pro-drop.
Edit: Vocabulary matters though because certain words are more likely to be replaced by loan words than others. More importantly, they allow linking with a language's close relatives (most importantly the other languages d'oïl), which might be more conservative, and with its historical forms across time. Said differently: languages without apparent similarity to other languages, no close existing relatives, and no written records to trace their development are isolates by definition.
Broken anything is hard to understand without practice, and easy (or, easier) to understand with practice. My experience in urban US is you hear a lot of broken English, so you get pretty good at understanding it.
My experience living in Paris is that a lot of the older folks have very little practice or desire to practice speaking with broken French speakers.
Japan I found to be similar. Fuck up the pronunciation the slightest bit and you’re just stared at blankly.
> French people always get criticized for not understanding foreigners' broken French. It is not out of malice.
Plenty of people seem to have anecdotes that are hard to explain in any way other than malice. I have one of my own:
I was out camping with the family in france, I don't remember where exactly. As is tradition we managed to forget to bring the can opener. Cue my dad in the campstore with a can trying to get the shop keeper to sell us a can opener. How can you possibly need more than someone miming a can opener with a can saying "ouvrir" to get what he was trying to communicate? Never mind that his french was plenty fluid enough to hold a conversation with plenty of other french people.
I'm sure most french people are perfectly nice and do their best to understand foreigners. But -- at least the last time I was over there -- there are also more than enough french people who just straight up refuse to understand foreigners to leave a bitter taste in peoples mouth.
>French people always get criticized for not understanding foreigners' broken French. It is not out of malice. It is because it actually is very hard to understand broken French.
Is it that difficult? I can understand broken French just fine as a non native speaker. For French people it looks as if it's impossible, but I don't buy it.
>People weren't correcting you to mock you. They wanted to understand and probably help you.
Judging from how indifferent and unhelpful retail workers, waiters, and such were, even when you speak perfect French or even when speaking in English in case they understand it, I doubt that's the case.
No, it's just that they were themselves learning French, so used to speaking broken French. You would get the same experience by gathering a German, an Australian and a Venezuelan all learning French as 2nd or 3rd language.
Additionally they most likely already knew English and were able to decipher "French broken by an English speaker".
Edit: and since we're sharing anecdotes. I got the same "rude" treatment from Russians when I was learning Russian in Russia, or from Swedish folks when learning Swedish in Stockholm. It's just hard for native speakers to deal with broken linguo, that's just how it is. Swedish people would even reply to me in English, some would call it rude, they were just trying to be helpful and efficient.
I don’t think this issue is about the French spoken in West Africa being 'broken.' Or that 'they were themselves learning French'… Rather, it reflects the tolerance and adaptability inherent in multilingual societies like those in West Africa.
People are simply more accustomed to communicating across different languages and more accepting of non-native speakers and various accents, even if they are native speakers themselves.
Ironically this tolerance as opposed to the supposed academic perfection of the language spoken in France makes use of the language as it was initially intended when it was created a lingua franca meant to be used by a wide variety of people.
In France however there is often less tolerance for varying pronunciations and accents, not everyone is the same in that regard but it’s definitely something people experience in France (we would wish that maybe they would resort to English sometime to continue the conversation or correcting us but this is much less likely too).
This isn't just about non-native speakers but also applies to native French speakers from regions like Quebec or Congo. Despite using similar vocabulary, they sometimes face challenges being understood in France, mainly due to their distinct accents, I mean I believe this also occurs between various region of France
> . In France however there is often less tolerance for varying pronunciations and accents,
Yes this was covered in my original message. Miss pronouncing a word in French can make it extremely hard to understand for a native speaker. And yes people from Quebec are an excellent example. They will often struggle when their accent is too strong when visiting France. And people are not ill meaning, Quebecois are very popular in France, it's just genuinely hard.
People often don't know that the French language was literally a political weapon to create France. France is political construct, not cultural like most countries. It is an aggregation of different cultures, including different languages. It was vital for France to succeed as a construct to force the idea of "correct French". A French language that would be the same everywhere, without local variations. So yeah, the French ear is not used to dealing with mistakes or strong accents.
The first time I went to US, I was pretty confident in my English but natives didn't understand me. I could repeat the same, grammatically correct sentence 3 times and they still wouldn't get it.
Then I realized that in English (especially American English) you have to accentuate the right syllabus or they won't understand you. Say you're going to "mounTAIN view" instead of "MOUNtain view" and they have no idea what place you're talking about.
That's with every dialect of English. English has phonemic stress, i.e. the way you stress a word can change its meaning or make it unrecognisable unless you're speaking to an English-speaker familiar with people who speak English coloured by whatever your native language is. This is a particular problem for French-speakers, since French doesn't have phonemic stress.
British and Irish people will probably understand French-accented English better than Americans because of greater exposure to French.
I remember a grad student who went through a similar incident. While I appreciated his frustration, I also understand the anxiety of the poor server trying to remember how to mix a Woahtuh before my colleague decided to enunciate the coda.
I interact with french in France for some 13 years, spending most weekends there (Chamonix! but all over the place from east to west to south, not much north yet).
First of all, french is not some beautiful language once you grok the grammar, rather pretty weird and old layered 'spaghetti code' with tons of exceptions to tons of obscure rules (nothing, absolutely nothing elegant there). Its needlessly complex especially when you know other languages solved it much better, and as with other bureaucratic stuff in France any attempt for reform failed. English to non-native (in both of those) is a beautiful magnificent blessing in comparison, you can be proficient with little, french will literally look puzzled at you and get really quickly fed up with you. Patience is really not a typical french virtue. But I guess if you like the feeling of struggling for whole life, looked down upon and gain motivation from it then its great.
Second, I don't know details of how schools work in France (seems a rather toxic place pushing way too hard for competitiveness but I may be wrong here), but I see result every day also in cca 50% of my colleagues - people are absolutely snobbish in the worst possible manner about their language to the point of being sometimes toxic, and automatically scowl at any tiny mistake. Guess what, as a foreigner trying to learn language you will make tons of them, even on C2 level. There is absolutely minimum help, they will just laugh at you like bunch of small kids, literally mocking you and pointing fingers at you. I mean 50+ years old higher managers bursting into laugh how stupid you are. Every single time. Schooling and overall mindset make french people behave like arrogant folks a lot (not so much say folks from African colonies, much much nicer folks to interact with; same for Swiss french and cca Belgians too. Don't know much about Quebec folks, but in casual conversation french mock and insult them behind their back pretty horribly). I've never ever been mocked by natives for making even basic mistakes in any other language, its just part of basic human decency.
I've seen recently shock and disgust among young French that some french local paragliding teacher exposed to decades of english-speaking tourists used some english words in his french. Those were some otherwise smart folks. I've had my very good American friend who is overweight literally gave up on french and France, on his month long trip there they were insulting and mocking him in the bars and restaurants, in hotels, in trains etc (I talk about staff, not other tourists). Man, I have hundreds of stories like this, unfortunately very consistent.
I know 5 languages, 3 of them very different compared to my native one, and French is by far the worst of them to learn and just use it (I know there are worse, just describing my experiences). French folks need to come in terms of not being superpower nor center of the world anymore and accepting there is more than their language in the world. I've visited every continent (apart from Antarctica) and generally travelled a lot and literally nowhere I felt so little welcomed and rather just tolerated due to money bringing in like in France. A truly beautiful place, history, cuisine, nature, but neither me, nor my wife (who studied in Lyon for quite some time) nor folks around us in similar situation certainly don't travel there for the local people, which is often the most important aspect of my traveling when going for exotics.
> First of all, french is not some beautiful language once you grok the grammar, rather pretty weird and old layered 'spaghetti code' with tons of exceptions to tons of obscure rules (nothing, absolutely nothing elegant there). Its needlessly complex especially when you know other languages solved it much better,
Though I can’t disagree with the “ancient spaghetti code” characterisation, “needlessly complex” is linguistically meaningless. People continuously use language and infelicities are typically rapidly eliminated.
My wife and I would between us resort to French express things that couldn’t be conveniently expressed in our respective native languages. I think it’s pretty common — probably universal — to inject foreign loan words or phrases in multilingual families or other groups. In the case of resorting to French, it’s usually for a word that has a lot of implications, ambiguity or other ramifications, which can be expressed compactly in French. A consequence of the spaghetti code you decry.
Written French grammar is particularly good at expressing nuances due to the expression of the variety of "times" and tenses.
J'aimais and j'aimai (imparfait and passé simple) are both past but
the first expresses "I loved (duration, action being performed in the past)" and the latter "I loved (instant, action completed)".
Je finissais (imparfait) = I was completing (some stuff), je finis (passé simple) = I completed.
Also
Je marcherais (conditionnel présent) = I would walk, (possible)
Je marcherai (futur) = I will walk (true)
(Maybe the ability to express a nuance discreetly is a sort of elegance)
You could say " this is spaghetti code" but
je marche, je marchai, je marchais, je marcherai, je marcherais respects some kind of nearly mathematical rules that allows me to feel situations.
March - e
March - ai
March - ais
Marcher - ai
Marcher - ais
J'ai marché, j'avais marché, j'eus marché, j'aurais marché, j'aurai marché express a lot of different things based on the different forms of "to have".
English has this kind of complexity too :
I have walked, I had walked, I did walk, I will walk, I will have walked, I did have walked...
I am not arguing about the possibility of nuances here but rather about the means by which they are expressed, of course.
That is very weird, I've spent a few months in France almost every year for the last 8 years and never had one bad experience. My wife speaks beginner French and not had any issues either. I know enough to order, please, thank you, nicely ask if they speak english, etc…
Was this one situation or multiple? What was the context?
For the reaction to be so strong I wonder if there was more than just broken French. Always easy to go with the super nice tourist/mean for no reason autoctone.
During my first trip to Paris, I was at a patisserie in an admittedly tourist-y part of town and the gentleman behind the counter yelled at me and insist I speak English when ordering. So in Paris stopped attempting to speak to them in French. However, people in Beaune and Chamonix humored me.
> No. In France they openly showed their disgust at my French and refused even to speak to me.
No. It’s most probably in your head and is inconsistent with everything I have seen or heard. Or you were unintentionally rude, maybe. There are pricks everywhere so I don’t doubt that someone was like that, but I seriously doubt that the people in general were.
~1.1B Mandarin speakers globally (a few countries, mother tongue in ~20 countries)
~1.5B English speakers globally (~400M native, official language for 67 countries)
So for much of the world it seems pretty clearly English (& has been since WWII) and French is in the “second” tier competing with Spanish and Mandarin (probably just behind Spanish & Mandarin in terms of penetration lingua franca is about being the bridge language).
I’m not sure where you’re getting your numbers, but Wikipedia claims 360 million native Arabic speakers, which pushes France a little further down the list.
> Based mostly on Northern Italy's languages (mainly Venetian and Genoese) and secondarily on Occitano-Romance languages (Catalan and Occitan) in the western Mediterranean area at first, Lingua Franca later came to have more Spanish and Portuguese elements, especially on the Barbary Coast (now referred to as the Maghreb). Lingua Franca also borrowed from Berber, Turkish, French, Greek and Arabic.
Technically no. Especially not the northern dialects which modern French is based on. Arabs/North Africans/etc. just called all Western European Franks. The actual dialect/pigeon language used in the Mediterranean and called "Lingua Franca" was mainly based on Northern Italian, Occitan and Catalan (so barely related to modern French).
That's not exactly true. To quote Wikipedia, Lingua franca meant literally "Frankish language" in Late Latin, and it originally referred specifically to the language that was used around the Eastern Mediterranean Sea as the main language of commerce.
> to the language that was used around the Eastern Mediterranean Sea as the main language of commerce.
Which was a language that was barely related to modern French (besides belonging to the same Romance language sub-branch which includes Catalan, Occitan and most Northern Italian dialects, coincidentally places where most of those merchants who introduced that language came from).
> Which was a language that was barely related to modern French (besides belonging to the same Romance language sub-branch which includes Catalan, Occitan and most Northern Italian dialects
It wasn't even on the Mediterranean at the time (or rather French was spoken in the North of modern France back then). People on Mediterranean coast of France were speaking Occitan and other dialects which were more closely related to Catalan and Northern Italian (all of those were mostly eradicated during and during the century or so after the French revolution).
The eradication of Occitan and other local languages like Breton was the strongest in mid 1800s to the early 1900s. Students speaking it would be punished.
it's certainly interesting. Imo music, and especially the rap by its generally large young audience and creativity is and have been a huge "influencer" of French.
I think the article fail a little bit to put in perspective other influences, and even more when the title say "Africans" when it focus on west and central Africa only. Africa is a continent that don't talk only French, North Africa is part of Africa too, and arabic countries do have an influence too. So, no more bad title please.
Also, it's interesting to think that initially, "True" French was imposed by the state, and by law, in France, that led to the end of local dialects. I just hope that it will not happen in reverse in some africans countries, as pointed out by the article...People should remain free of speech, in whatever languages they want to use.
I don't think anyone is surprised half a continent speaking French has its own twist on the language. But it is interesting to read about, especially the impact that hip-hop and rap in these countries have had on the dialects, such as calling your boyfriend bread.
The Académie nowadays is (mostly) a bunch of old politically influent people with zero or little linguistic knowledge. They stopped reforming the language almost two hundred years ago and now they can only hope that people will keep paying them attention. But the language will keep evolving and drifting, and they will keep resisting, until the divergence will be so large that they will just disappear into nothingness, and people will ask: "why did people bother with them for so long?..."
Or, as the young ones do nowadays, they'll just say "Cheh!" to the Académie.
Is that really? I know in Quebec it’s the government that decides what is thought in school and the French they use is definitely diverging from outdated académie française. Not sure about France
I Quebec maybe, because it is a different language (Canadian French) and they can decide what they want (though since they are fine with the Queen bing their ruler, I do not see reasons fro the French Academy not to be the source of wisdom when it comes to French /s)
The french that kids learn at school is different than the french they speak with their family[1] of the french they speak with their friends[2]. People adapt based on contexts.
I don't think it makes a huge difference on how the language evolve, as ultimately the French Academy cannot force french people to speak one way or another.
The only big effect it has is it brings additional hurdles for kids coming from another french speaking country when their country of origin has largely adopted simplified grammar and conjugations.
[1] regional expressions with sometimes a simplified/modified grammar on those
[2] use of slang + verlan (reversing some words) + adoption of some arabic words
Do your research on European Portuguese vs Brazilian Portuguese, and you’ll realize that the latter owns its own version and defines its own standard without needing the consent from any other country.
So, there is nothing France or any institution can do about it.
Really, this is more of a honorific position for famous authors and those with enough political influence. Some deserve their fame, but they tend to be passed their prime and are far from expert linguists.
Their contributions are often treated as a joke by most French people. One of their mission is to maintain an official dictionary of the French language. The latest edition is nearly 100 years old. And for reforms, they only part of the process, most of the real work is done by actual expert linguists and legislators.
Spot on.
I am surprised that such a topic has been made an article about given that language mutates 100% of the time as soon as leaves its place of origin for whatever the mean, from accent, to colloquialisms and to slangs.
It happened to Spanish, English and to other languages.
> The Académie nowadays is (mostly) a bunch of old politically influent people with zero or little linguistic knowledge.
Yet thanks to them we escaped that hellhole nonsense that is the so called "écriture inclusive". All evolutions aren't good. French grammar needs to be simplified though, but not made a trophe on the altar of intersectionality.
"Mesdames et Messieurs" is inclusive. You've heard that for as long as you can remember.
"Statut : marié(e)" is also inclusive. Check your tax return.
The median "." for example "marié.e" is also inclusive and is probably what you're against. Please hate it right, we all use inclusive, even in English (ladies and gentlemen for example). Being inclusive is good, you're doing it too.
> "Mesdames et Messieurs" is inclusive. You've heard that for as long as you can remember.
Oh so french was already "inclusive" then? LOL.
> The median "." for example "marié.e" is also inclusive
I don't care about "inclusivity", it's weasel word for intersectionalists. The "median ." isn't french language, it's unreadable when literred everywhere.
"l'écriture inclusive" is a canonical exemple of cultural vandalisme (and newspeak, absolutely nothing inclusive about that language, but intersectionality is first and foremost a war on language).
It was already inclusive, through these means, yes. This is the real "écriture inclusive".
I've seen your other contributions on this post and I think I'm done exchanging with you. You nitpicked just the right thing and forgot all about the rest of my comment. Have a nice day, you need some love.
> I've seen your other contributions on this post and I think I'm done exchanging with you. You nitpicked just the right thing and forgot all about the rest of my comment. Have a nice day, you need some love.
"La réforme oui, la chienlit, non".
The french language was never "inclusive" and doesn't need to be, it's called "courtoisie". The default is the masculine gender, that's a grammatical rule, and listing feminine gender next to it is purely a matter of courtoisie.
There is no "inclusivity" problem with the french language because there is no "inclusivity" problem to begin with, only in the head of the people specialized in making grievances a business.
I think you don't know what you are talking about.
Intersectionality is a framework where it is believed that for systemic issues it makes sense to not look at individual axis of oppression/empowerment (race, gender, ...), but to look for the combined individual effect (or something like that, apparently there is no consensus on the details)
Using "inclusive language" means that you use words to address the target audience in a way that all members feel approached. So e.g. just saying "Mesdames" would target a female only audience. If there would be males in the target group you would not have included them. It's not a "weasel word" for anything else.
> I don't care about "inclusivity"
So you would be fine if people would call you Madame (assuming you are a male)?
> The "median ." isn't french language, it's unreadable when literred everywhere.
There are similar discussions in other languages, but ultimately, language is evolving naturally and not by a standard body. The language is what people use to communicate.
So you are free to dislike it and advocate against it, but saying it isn't french language is meaningless. Every change to a language was not part of the language before.
Yeah, it's advocating for changes on language (what you call war), because language determines what people think.
> I think you don't know what you are talking about.
I think I'm simply not buying into that evil ideology. I know exactly what I'm talking about, I've seen the consequences of bolshevism already. "intersectionality" is no different, same old marxist garbage.
You do not seem to want to engage in a fair discussion where arguments are exchanged.
This debate culture will not help in convincing others about your view.
Sorry you are so bitter about this...
> You do not seem to want to engage in a fair discussion where arguments are exchanged. This debate culture will not help in convincing others about your view. Sorry you are so bitter about this...
You want a debate about the 'virtues' of communism? LOL...
> I agree, top-down linguistive prescriptivism is good when it means not catering to marginalised people
"marginalised" according to whom? The only thing that is marginalizing people trying to learn french here is text with .é.ée or so everywhere. That definitely excludes french language learners from reading french.
Anyway, that debate is over, back to intersectionalists attempting at another wave of newpseak nonsense.
> But the language will keep evolving and drifting, and they will keep resisting, until the divergence will be so large that they will just disappear into nothingness, and people will ask: "why did people bother with them for so long?..."
I think it's a good occasion to bring up Katharevousa[0], an effort (more imho than an actual spoken language) to "clean up" contemporary Greek; the tldr net result was you couldn't file your taxes, because the language on the forms was not the language you spoke with your family and neighbors.
> until the divergence will be so large that they will just disappear into nothingness, and people will ask: "why did people bother with them for so long?..."
> Members of the French Academy, the 17th-century institution that publishes an official dictionary of the French language, have been working on the same edition for the past 40 years.
This is nonsense. The French Academy is adding new words to the dictionary every year.
The whole article is weak to say the least. Of course, the French spoken abroad is changed by the local influences. This is the sam case as with any language that crosses countries boundaries. There are major differences within France as well.
In everyday discussions, I do not see any special influence from Africa on our language. The influence of instant messaging is orders of magnitude larger and I have to decipher phrases such as "vzy cr". Or monstrosities such as "sa va koi" which are shaping our language deep down because it is how many young people express themselves.
French is complicated and mostly masochist (we are the champions of how to write something easy most difficultly, and crank weirdness of pronunciation to 100). It is not helping that we are rigid in how the language evolves (and sometimes straight ridiculous). But the changes to French French come from inside France, the ones from Mali French - from within Mali etc.
French here, living abroad for more than 10 years.
> sa va koi
Phonetically, it's easy. "ça va quoi"
> vzy cr
vas-y... you lost me here. crève?
That kind of reminds me of a joke some rapper (I think) made about, I wanna say 20 years ago, when young people from the banlieue were starting to cut words. I don't remember it exactly, but it went from "arrête ça" (stop it) being verlan'ized to "teuarass" and when they'd go to cut to "te", he would say "arrête ça tout de suite" (stop it now).
> we are the champions of how to write something easy most difficultly
I guess you're thinking about things like "qu'est-ce que"?
This said, I am all for a simplification of French, esperanto-style, to make it easier for everyone (native and non-native users of French)
> > vzy cr
> vas-y... you lost me here. crève?
It was "vas-y carré", which in English means "go ahead, all good". I do not blame you for not knowing, I had to check twice.
> I guess you're thinking about things like "qu'est-ce que"?
qu'est-ce que c'est ça, eaux to say "o", the -amment and -emment you never know when to use, the plus-que-parfait du subjonctif that is the national joke, Louis that nobody outside of France can pronounce correctly, sometimes one r, sometimes two, sometimes one l, sometimes two.
All of this is well documented of course: the core of our grammar/vocabulary/conjugaison rules is maybe 50 pages, and then you have two or three tomes of exceptions.
Then we have writers such as Proust who are hated by children at school because they have to dissect his 15-line sentences to say which part does what.
Most of this information is completely useless - when my children started school, I had to dig back into books to recall what was what.
> This said, I am all for a simplification of French
Interestingly, they tried 15 or 20 years ago, and that went nowhere. The only thing I remember about it is they wanted to simplify oignon, but I don't even remember if they suggested removing the i or spelling it like in English.
> It was "vas-y carré"
I guess I'm too old to know this, even non abbreviated.
> sometimes one r, sometimes two, sometimes one l, sometimes two.
Same with m, etc. And many more. The "fun" part of living abroad and barely speaking or writing French is that now there are plenty of times where I can't find words or how to spell them. It's compounded by the fact that English spelling of similar words is sometimes different (e.g. address vs adresse), or worse, some words spelt the same way have different meanings (which trips French natives often, but now I sometimes have the opposite problem, ironically)
> Interestingly, they tried 15 or 20 years ago, and that went nowhere
I guess you are talking about the 1990 reform. I would not say that it went nowhere, most of the changes are now in the school curriculum.
This is far from the radical simplification I have in mind, though :)
> I guess I'm too old to know this, even non abbreviated.
It helps to have a teenager at home and a need to communicate with them through WhatsApp
> The "fun" part of living abroad and barely speaking or writing French is that now there are plenty of times where I can't find words or how to spell them
I left France for about 25 years and when I got back, I realized I lost my French accent. Today people are trying to pinpoint the place I am from, sometimes it is Belgium, sometimes Switzerland. I am from the western suburbs of Paris...
Do not worry: I sometimes have problems spelling words even though I was always very good in grammar and vocabulary, and the words I struggle with are sometimes obvious. Google helps to fix that (I type what I think is the word and it asks me "do you mean ...").
> This is nonsense. The French Academy is adding new words to the dictionary every year.
It's not nonsense. They are still working on the same edition, just progressively adding words. There is some debate today, though, because they're mostly working A to Z, so words close to the start of the alphabet have definitions that were written down long ago. The definition for "femme", for example, is controversial. You can read up on this here: https://www.academie-francaise.fr/le-dictionnaire/la-9e-edit...
It's okay not to know something, but maybe inform yourself before calling what other people write "nonsense".
Aaand... you are right. I stand corrected. I follow some of the new words added but they were all either in Larousse or Robert - not the dictionary of the Académie Française. Sorry for that.
In my defense, the "nonsense" feeling was mostly after reading the whole article on how local variants of a language heavily impact the source one.
In Nice, I learned that nobody ever calls a toilet a "WC", but rather a "toilette", and that "ne" is generally optional in "ne .. pas" negation. But rappers like Dadju taught me Congolese slang like "kitoko." It took years to transform my American high school French into something less alien to people in France. Music was a huge part of that, though.
you can say « les vécés » (or « le vatér » if you're an old Belgian man maybe), but more common are « les toilettes », « les chiottes » (vulgar but very common)
As for any other language, textbook French isn't exactly what French people speak, and different social classes have their own slang, but the language isn't changing that much.
I'd argue that it's becoming simpler as younger generations have a more limited vocabulary. They also tend to integrate more and more English words (pronounced as French words), as it's something perceived as cool. Interestingly, this is true in all layers of society, including business and politics.
I'd say that's one of the worst thing in French :
The gap between written and spoken is so much bigger than say spanish which I think makes it hard for foreigners.
That's a bummer for me. I spent +2 years learning French and now you're telling me this is useless. I'd assume I can talk with older folks and try to practice at restaurants, museums, etc. Prob I won't be able to communicate with GenZ but probably that's not the case for millennials.
It isn't useless. The parent is 100% hyperbolic, at best. The fact is just that some people living in France can't speak french properly for various reasons, but it's not a generality. The french you've learn is the official one, and if you go into a restaurant, speak "academic french" and the waiter doesn't understand you, then that person isn't a french native.
The parent is basically saying "English is useless in USA, because people in some places speak broken English". Of course it's completely absurd in both cases.
The french you've learn, everybody who went to school in France learns that exact same language.
It’s not useless. It’s just that there is some vocabulary that you won’t learn without some immersion in the culture. Same with any language, to be honest.
Colloquial speech exists in every language and new learners usually aren't taught colloquial speech in a formal manner (hence their confusing upon actually interacting with speakers of that language). This isn't unique to French.
I've immigrated to France in high school - my French was pretty good by academic standards, and I was able to understand what teachers were saying in class, from day 1.
Conversations with my peers were a different story - like they were speaking another language. First time I've heard (on the first day there) 'chais pas' and somebody explained that to me, I realized I'm in for another 3-6 months of learning the language. One thing that was apparent though, is that the best way to learn is just to immerse yourself into a group - even if you don't understand anything in the beginning. The progress will be much quicker than any sort of academic training.
I guess it's time the French gave up on the colonialist idea of the "Francophonie" and accepted that French is evolving independently in other countries just like English, Spanish, Portuguese or Dutch.
I wonder how much of this being perceived as "changing French" rather than just other countries having their own variants of similar languages goes back to France holding onto its colonies and trying to keep them close even after some of them formally gained independence.
Nobody would write an article about how Mexicans are "changing Spanish" or Brazilians are "changing Portuguese" let alone about how South Africans are "changing Dutch" (it's called Afrikaans and considered a distinct language just like Belgian Flemish). Some "spillback" via migration from the former colonies is hardly worth writing about.
Every time France wants to organize something with african countries, the world colonialism is thrown somewhere in the discussion. French colonialism died 50 years ago. Time to move on.
All countries in the world can participate in "Francophonie" initiatives or meetings. There are 88 countries who participate in it. It is just a club to promote french language.
France has strong support for French (language) music.
The end result is that a lot of it is pretty decent. (Sure there is complete trash, they don’t have better tastes than others)
Some rappers write books that win literature prizes. Plenty of French language hip hop and rap has deep lyrics that go way beyond what most English language stuff achieves.
Just been in France recently. The radio really plays only French-African music. At least 90% of the time. I don't think it's anything racist about that. It just that France changed and I think most of Europe will change as well due immigration. We will see more African, Asian and maybe middle-eastern culture.
Evidently we're not allowed to notice anything change in the event it can be perceived as being racist? How is it those people are comfortable making such a statement online? There is bias, prejudice, and bigotry before you even get to racism. Conveniently supremacy is forgotten about unless a very strong character accusation is needed. I very much dislike how these "conversations" around race relations are occurring. I think I'm just starting to not care about how others perceive whatever I say. If they can't have a conversation without immediately suspecting the other party of racism then maybe they need to stay offline.
Like London, Paris is really quite big. While the city is constantly changing, all the old neighborhoods haven’t suddenly lost their identity. This fear of losing “Paris proper” is completely overblown.
Culture is always in a state of flux. It’s not sad, it just is. I’m not sad I won’t get to see Victorian London. In the narrative arc of humanity things keep getting better, not worse.
I'm not sure how common this preference is. I'm personally always sad when unique cultures diminish or disappear and this seems to be a not unusual sentiment judging by popular media. Whether this is the Cherokee or Victorian England there are valuable and interesting things and losing them is sad.
Victorian England will forever live on in Sherlock Holmes novels, Ripperana, Dickens Fairs, steampunk. There is an article about Victorian customs on the front page. It is literally one of the most overexposed, overplayed, and overused historical eras.
i haven’t ever visited abidjan proper. the people don’t even speak their native language. some are ashantis but can’t speak a word of twi. if you weep for a fabled paris, i weep for abidjan. and i weep for algiers too.
no sure why people downvoted you. Maybe people are unaware of how stupid the french state has become when dealing with immigration.
Yes, they did write a text saying that races officially don't exist, as there's just one human race ( as if this decision would solve any issue, whether that's racism or immigrant integration)
You're find this out now? After four centuries of Spanish in the Americas, Spanish speakers there have developed an enormous culture and diversity and innovation in the language. I remind my Spanish friends that there are three times the number of Spanish speakers in Mexico than in Spain. In fact, there are more Spanish speakers in the United States there are more Spanish speakers than in Spain. Ditto for Portuguese, where Brazil and the Portuguese in Africa have developed delightful versions of Portuguese -and an enormous and diverse culture. France and the French should be proud that their language and culture are being spread and transformed by the French speaking nations in Africa; I especially love the music coming out of Mali, Senegal and Algeria (Rai, anyone?).
I think the downvotes are because of the snark/swipe in "You're finding this out now?". That kind of thing is against the site guidelines - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - not just "Don't be snarky" and "Edit out swipes", but also "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." The point of the OP is not surprise that this is happening (obviously language evolves in this way), but curiosity about how it is happening.
It's a pity because the rest of the comment is fine.
> It's a pity because the rest of the comment is fine.
It's indeed sad because it offered a nice general argument: cultures interates on what they produce, in a feedback loop. It produces wonderful new creations.
So it shouldn't be a surprise, both for language and for music.
I care more about the music part, because I've found some gems where I didn't expect them. It's taught me to keep my eyes (and my ears lol) open for the wonderful new creations that are all around us, but that we may miss.
Woah, did not expect to see a Magic System fan when I opened up HN today. I was living in the Ivory Coast when Premier Gauo came out. I love their music and it brought back some good memories. Thank you!
If you have some current hits you can recommend, I'd love to get recommendations from another Magic System fan!
In return I can suggest artists like Slava Marlow, or places like zaycev.net to get a nice curated experience without involving youtube: just click on the play button at the bottom of the screen: currently I'm listening to Subbota (Дым бомбим)
I havent listened to French music ever since I moved to the states, so unfortunately I don’t have any tunes to share. I’ll have to give your recommendations a listen. Thanks for sharing!
> Woah, did not expect to see a Magic System fan when I opened up HN today.
Maybe "fan" is a bit too strong but I'd say any French speaking person, at least in France and Belgium, growing up in the 90/2000s, knows Premier Gaou and can sing a bit of it. It was very popular.
Interesting, I didn’t realize the song spread to France! We used to listen to a lot of I Am. I guess the world was more connected even back then than I realized.
For those learning French I would strongly advise against learning/copying too much from singers like Aya Nakamura. At least do be aware of the kind of language this is.
Otherwise it'd be like learning English with Easy E before a business trip to a London law firm.
I just checked a few of the songs on https://www.supraphonline.cz/album/50244-entre-deux-mondes (the 1999 album isn't on suprphon) there's some good beat but it's not very complex music-wise. I'll try to find the 1999 album and check it too.
Given the musical composition (stanza, vocals, etc.) I hesitate to call that rap.
It's different from say Baby or Djadja by Nakamura, she's often categorized in Afrobeat but I would absolutely group them together in their style: I don't know how to name it (French Fusion?), but I love it!
YES: the music and the rythms are great but the visual composition (scenery, etc) is even more wonderful: in Cadillac the drone shots then the rotations with the slow blends of racing games ending the nostril are very unique.
The visuals in rap are rarely that creative
> As a native speaker I’m genuinely surprised
Do you find surprising I also like the social critique from IC3PEAK (Смерти Больше Нет) or моргенштерн (Aristocrat)? (but he's lost some of his magic since he moved)
I can't recommend anything, I just think that the language itself is not suitable for rap (long words, etc) and you have to butcher the language to make it usable for the genre. There is a reason why Detsl (the first successful Russian rapper) switched to English in his latest tracks.
What you are describing is radicalization. People who are doing fine don't get easily radicalized. Why are they being radicalized then? Because they are not doing fine. Why are they not doing fine? Because of the colonial legacy and France supporting the status quo by propping up corrupt oligarchs/dictators in many parts of Francophone Africa.
By instantly jumping to Russia/Wagner you are merely assisting radicalization by further antagonizing Africans. The USA tried to pin everything that went wrong since 2016 on Russia, did it fix anything? Look at any poll for 2024 and you shall have your answer.
> I think that this article is diffusing "propaganda
It is not. And there is legitimate a reason for that: France's continuous economic influence in Africa, through economic exploitation and military presence[1], which is creating this anti-french sentiment. The same influence that it contests from other countries now that they are expanding theirs.
France is the number 1 reason for political instability in Africa. They have supported, armed and financed african dictators for generations.
France put itself in the 'opposition of african prosperity' position.
Random examples:
- Destroyed Lybia and refused to be held responsible. The US had the decency (?) to at least spend a 100 billions trying to repair Irak and Afghanistan. [1]
- Supporting Paul Biya [2], Ali Bongo and his father before him[3] , Idriss Deby [4] and his father before him, Faure Gnassingbe [5] and his father before him, Sassou Nguesso [6] is still terrorizing Congo... I can go on and on from 1949 to 2023.
- The currency of African countries is still printed and controlled by France [7]. France forces this countries to deposit half their money in French Treasurery. France industries hugely benefits from buying raw materials with a currency they control. African currencies are forced to be converted to Euro first, then to another one for exchanges.
- France routinely validates and congratulates Dictators after `winning` sham elections [8].
I fairly do not have a single good thing to say about the presence of France in Africa. France routinely lies about 'investing' in Africa. Where is the last power plant, hospital, or school built or invested in by France? In 10 years, we've seen roads, power plants, ports, airports, schools, universities from China, Turkey, Lebanon and even Russia (!) .
Now the french wants to whine about some russian 'fake news' being the reason why they are hated across a whole continent, which is not the case.
The french have been in Africa for the last 250 years. They have their neighbourhoods, their schools, their restaurants. They rarely mix with the local population for reasons other than sex.
Their priests and military personnel raped so many of our grand-mothers, and when caught were just sent to another african countries.
If somebody that has known you, learned your language and gastronomy, consumed your music and movies for 250 years does not want to be with you, it's not because of gossip.
France lost the plot, with the EU as with Africa, and they can only blame themselves for it.
I mean the Russians trying to exert soft power of Europe is a thing, but over a century if French colonialism _really_ doesn't help your argument one bit.
French colonialism ended a long time ago, like in the 60s. It’s been over 60 years.
[edit] The French even regularly hold referendums in COMs like New Caledonia offering to cut them loose. But the last one they had 97% voted to remain part of France. Sometimes it’s good to be a dependency of a world power.
I should correct myself, New Caledonia isn’t a COM (collectivité d'outre-mer) anymore but a sui generis collectivity. But I digress.
>French colonialism ended a long time ago, like in the 60s. It’s been over 60 years.
On paper yes, unofficially it never stopped. It just went underground and got better PR, as now it's no longer enslavement under the barrel of a gun, but under the pressure of money.
Check out the CFA Franc[1] and Guinea, which was pressured by France to accept the CFA Franc currency, which brought financial instability and disadvantageous economic relationships between African countries and France.
Or how most of Africa's resources are exploited by French (and British) companies by bribing whatever corrupt despot rules each country with the blessing of French/UK leadership, to be allowed to extract valuable resources for pennies on the dollar way below market rate while the country and the people get nothing out of it. Sure, it's technically not colonialism, as the British/French flags are no longer planted there, but come one, it's basically outsourced colonialism with extra steps through middle men.
The CFA franc is used by 14 countries. Until 2020, those countries were required to deposit half of their foreign exchange reserves with the French Treasury. France also maintains a military presence in several of its former colonies.
Colonialism may have ended, but France continues to exert influence in Africa.
> Colonialism may have ended, but France continues to exert influence in Africa.
Yes, of course. Lots of countries exert influence in Africa. The PRC just opened its first off-shore military base Djibouti. Russia has whatever fresh hell the Wagner group is bringing - especially to the Central African Republic. America has bases in at least 10 African countries.
Colonialism may be over but challenges in managing international influence will always persist.
This is misleading in the extreme. The Kanaky separatists boycotted the referendum.
Something I find equally interesting is how apologists for European colonialism are perfectly content to claim 60 years is a long time (with the implication that it no longer matters), when systems were designed to explicitly keep the former colonies subservient, often including co-opting, or cultivating a corrupt elite. At what point would you say it became inconsequential? After 2 years? Two decades? 4?
The referendum was based on a set calendar. The French central government refused to have it rescheduled. The Kanaky nationalists were opposed to having it run in the thick of COVID. The trajectory was in their favour, based on previous referendum outcomes, so I'm inclined to believe they boycotted as a matter of principle. In the end, the people who voted were mostly settlers from Metropolitan France, whose representatives are now actively working to roll back Kanaky autonomy. This information is very easy to find for anyone who cares, so I'm (genuinely) curious why you'd ask in what seems like a casually dismissive tone.
What a malicious lie. Former colonies were still paying debts for 50 years plus, and many of them are still paying them. France has first rights to the natural resources of many of its former colonies. Colonialism never ended, it has simply changed hands. Now corrupt African politicians trade the futures of their countries and constituents as servants of empire instead of the colonial powers having direct rule. And even China is getting a piece of the pie now.
If you feel that way, then you literally know nothing about the characteristics of many colonial states as they actually existed. One has to wonder why you’re speaking so authoritatively on the subject of that is the case.
The political impacts of the European powers' creation of borders and their intervention in places like Haiti remain to this day, lest you think people should just "let it go".
Nobody's going to deny that the impacts of past actions continue into the present and the reasonably anticipated future. That's not the claim I'm making. I claimed that France hasn't had colonialist ambitions or policies in 60+ years. You mentioned a 'century of colonialism' - I'm pointing out that it ended more than half a century ago.
And I'm what I'm telling you is that nobody in Africa cares that it finished 50 years ago when the impacts are still felt today and the economic influence of the developed world continues on that tradition.
> Then we have at least half a century of Russia being abused that way...
Ah yup... Because Stalin who wanted to execute 30 000 Nazis officer to "give an example" was a saint? (for the record it's Churchill who opposed to that)
And the attitude of the USSR during the cold war was a respectable one?
As in: people in eastern germany were happy to live on that side of the Berlin wall and not in western germany instead?
Seriously: russians weren't villain-worthy enough to you during the cold war?
Ask ukrainians what they think about your point of view...
Where did I talk about France? I was commenting on your comment about movies portaying Russia has being "propaganda".
> The rest of stuff is the same level of pathetic. Eastern Germans complaining they didn't get access to white privilege, that they deserve by birthright, for almost forty years is sure tragic.
What does "white privilege" have to do with anything in post-WWII Europe?
Are you really going down that route? Germany (both western and eastern) had been levelled to ground during WWII, with many german civilians killed. Wanna talk about their "white privileges"? You wanna talk about the "white privilege" of my grandfather who spent five years in a prison in germany during WWII or the "white privilege" of all the countries in Europe who were living under the dictature of nazi germany?
Wanna talk about the "white privilege" of the tens of thousands of US soldiers who died to free Europe?
Maybe you wanna talk too about the "jewish privilege" during WWII too?
EDIT: oh... apparently you're russian or you live in Russia. So you're defending the USSR and you're not commenting on the invasion of Ukraine. Makes sense now.
This is not about Africa but rather Haiti
but I think the point stands.
Why can't France give Haiti USD 21B?
Or even USD 100B.
It doesn't have to be in one lump sum.
Would that bankrupt France?
When I look up France GDP,
I see 2.958 trillion USD (2021).
Actually do some good in the world for once.
(And make some money for French companies doing so).
Build some physical infrastructure in Haiti.
Clean drinking water, reforestation, etc...
a hundred billion dollars will go a long way in a country like Haiti...
> But some in France are slow to embrace change. Members of the French Academy, the 17th-century institution that publishes an official dictionary of the French language, have been working on the same edition for the past 40 years.
Lmao, no, they don't. They actually pay other people to do that work.
People abroad don't seem to realize that the academys, most notably the french academy are mostly a retirement scheme for elder conservative members of the establishment. When you're no longer relevant, you go there to earn a fat paycheck doing nothing, and occasionally rant about how it was better before.
