> Back in the middle ages, when the French conquered Britain, the ruling class spoke French and the peasants spoke English.
This features quite a bit in War and Peace, too. As tensions increase between France and Russia as Napoleon takes over much of Europe and war between the countries looms, you'll find Russian nobility taking Russian language classes, because their first language is French!
I can't help but be reminded of how in "War and Peace", almost all aristocratic characters (which is nearly everyone in the book) speaks French most of the time.
There's a lot of cause and effeect assumptions in the article.
French has long been the lingua franca of the top tier of the international upper class, due to history changing outcomes of the Frankish dynasties. In fact, the French language's status, as such, is indirectly where we get the term lingua franca. Modern English Royalty, for example, may not always be fluent in French (many are) but they are more likely to have second language instruction in French than in other languages. Knowledge of certain French words and phrases is essential to English language literacy. There isn't another language for which the same can be said in the context of the English language. The invading Normans were as likely to be fluent in English, Dutch, and/or German and they were in French. The medieval conflicts between the Norman-English and French Kings are best characterized as a conflict between different Houses of the Franks.
>French was one of the languages of both spoken and written communication in England for an extended period from 1066 onwards and it was still used in some legal contexts up to the end of the 17th century.
Fun fact: it still is!
The formal process for the passage of bills in Parliament uses Norman French phrases - "La Reyne le veult" ("The Queen wishes it") being the most widely known as it is used during prorogation to signify that royal assent has been given to a bill to make it an Act of Parliament.
Similarly, bills transmitted between the two houses of Parliament are sent with Norman French phrases.
Russian doesn't borrow heavily? There's a ton of borrowing from French in Russian.... I hadn't appreciated quite how much until I started learning French.
Sadly I gave up studying French and focused on Russian and German. I have experience in all countries and after being in France I was so disheartened I gave up. My uni grades for French reflect this :(
The joy of a Russian who hears you at least try to speak Russian vs. the French baker who barks at you in response in English
> Similar happened in France and French Quebec. Modern French is formalized Parisian french. While Canadian French is country French, according to a very posh friend, the most educated québécois still sounds like a country hick the first time he hears them.
You got it backward. Modern French is bourgeois Parisian French. It was standardized more than a century after the French revolution (in the 1880's when public education became mandatory).
When Québec was colonized in the 1600's, only a handful of territories in France spoke French, mostly around Paris. This was the language of the court, the nobility and a minority of peasants. The rest of the country spoke various languages, such as Caló, Catalan, Corsican, Franco-Provençal, Ligurian, Occitan, Flemish, Luxembourgish, Alsatian, Breton, and Basque [1]. Furthermore, Parisian French was only one of the d'Oïl languages spoken at the time [2].
The colonists that settled and explored Québec were mostly from northern France, the region where an Oïl language was spoken. The language spoken in the colony was standardized to match the one of the royal administration (Parisian French).
Due to not being a French Territory when the revolution happened, Québec kept a fork of Royal French. Reading written french from the 1600's and 1700's out loud is striking, as it's almost identical the pronunciation of modern Québécois French. An example of this is the term "Moi", spelled Moé in the 1700's and pronounced Mo-a (Moi) by modern continental French and Mo-Hey (Moé) in Québécois French.
> It's apparently a common phenomenon that language continues to evolve and grow in the native country, while in colonies and former colonies, people tend to become more protective and orthodox about the language.
Language continues to evolve and grow everywhere. What's going on isn't some impossible impulse in the Quebecois to conserve their language; they are trying to differentiate themselves from English-speaking Canada. The French in France don't need to worry about getting culturally absorbed in the way the Quebecois do.
I agree, there's a fair bit. It's tricky to find numbers, and it's definitely really in flux, offices that speak English today would sometimes have been unthinkable 10 years ago. Fun story, worked at foreign affairs as an intern some years ago and due to the nature of our work being international and so much of our communication with partners etc, our papers, presentations and research etc was English, it was proposed to start having meetings in English, too, so we wouldn't have to translate any English documentation we might be discussing. Again, foreign affairs, a job you can only get if you're a national of the country, that requires you to sign documents you won't disclose state secrets etc, obviously it's by its nature a pretty chauvinistic affair so I thought that was funny. Another interesting remark is that they used to require you to speak French, too, to work at foreign affairs, for decades and decades this was THE diplomatic language of the world and you couldn't get a job unless you spoke it fluently. (same thing for the UN for example, Ban Ki Moon had to take intense classes in French to get his job although somehow he got a pass as his French is beyond horrible), but at foreign affairs they also let go of this French requirement. It's still beneficial but it's no longer mandatory. How times have changed.
Finally a fun anecdote about the role of French in history and some thoughts about where language might go in the future, I remember when reading war and peace where the Russian aristocracy's command of French is much better than their Russian, and as Russia is invaded by France, they scramble for tutors to improve their Russian lest they're deemed 'too French' in a Russia at war with France. It reminds me of arab family members who went to French private schools in arab speaking countries, and their arabic is pretty bad because of it. It's kind of funny in that in history the elite were often relatively multilingual and internationally oriented, but the rest (the vast majority) was not, and instead spoke the local language (or even dialect) and was locally oriented. Each spoke the language of their network, one which was relatively large, the other which was local with most people never traveling 50km from where they were born, or communicate with people outside that radius. But with the advent of modern tech, we're seeing dirt cheap long-distance communication networks, relatively cheap transport etc etc, you know the story... and I wonder if that will create language homogeneity in the world on a scale we've never seen before, when the majority of the population starts speaking a more international standard language (like say French was for some centuries the standard international language of elites, only now it's not confined to the top 1%). With the above anecdotes I can hardly imagine we won't all be speaking English/Spanish/Chinese/Arabic/Hindi as our first language next century, and everything else as our second, just like the Russian elite spoke French first, Russian second, and some of my family French first, Arabic second, and I in my professional life (and increasingly personal) English first, Dutch second. It'd take some major conflict to flare up nationalist notions to preserve the hundreds of languages different people now have as their 'first' language, like it took the invasion of Russia for the Russian elite to denounce French culture and fashion and choose Russian first.
Anyway I definitely share your experiences back home in the Netherlands but then I did always pick international jobs. But more generally speaking, there's tons of jobs where I'd absolutely have to speak Dutch, virtually anything client-facing, most B2B comms is Dutch still and I've read a few times on Glassdoor of employees complaining that despite the company being internationally-oriented, Dutch is still used a fair bit and they feel left out of conversations (often non-work convos). That doesn't say much about what you can get away with, if you wanted you could probably speak to 95% of customers, partners and colleagues in English just fine, but it says something about what is expected and happens in practice, which is surprising as the Dutch do speak a ton of English and they even enjoy it (to the extent a big complaint from foreigners is that they can't practice Dutch because if you try a sentence, the Dutch person will switch to English. But that's 1 on 1, if you're the only foreigner in a bar or workplace with 6 Dutch friends/colleagues, Dutch is still very much the norm and that's why it's still a requirement for most jobs. In looking abroad for jobs in say Spain I still feel the jobs I can pick where English is good enough are pretty narrow and I really only have the option of a narrow selection of jobs, same for France, Germany slightly less so but there too. And the further out you go, Italy for example, it gets worse. In London I can land any job - except translation or teaching jobs where native proficiency is really crucial - the difference is pretty big.
I suppose this is because in the UK there is still this whiff of upper class and culture if you can speak French. The new King Charles was the first monarch to give a speech in the French parliament (afaik), and he did it in French, for instance.
Spanish? Nah, we sunk the Armada and took Gibraltar, that's about it... and let's not forget the Argies.
> most people are taught in school when learning French
You probably mean: when learning French _in Italy_. If you learn it in France, there is usually no comparison with Italian or Latin, so this specific pattern is just lost.
If you try to speak Russian, no matter how broken, you will be encouraged and praised by every Russian person out there, no exceptions. The same is with Spanish. With French, it doesn't work this way, for some reason.
How well would you say you know Russian after a fully-gilded tree?
I was in the process of pushing French up to level 2 when they introduced a ton of new content. So I'm projecting my way back up to a full level 1. (I had boostrapped that with Pimsleur.)
That, plus reading, a few podcasts, and Netflix has gotten me to the point where I can push my way through a young adult novel (with a dictionary) or watch a kid's show (usually with the subtitles, since French is a terrible, terrible language to listen to).
So I'm curious what it's like after 1200 days. (My current streak is about 400. Early in the pandemic I'd do a dozen lessons a day; now I do the bare minimum.) How would you describe your familiarity with the language?
This features quite a bit in War and Peace, too. As tensions increase between France and Russia as Napoleon takes over much of Europe and war between the countries looms, you'll find Russian nobility taking Russian language classes, because their first language is French!
reply