Some years ago — not long before I retired — I had to go to Beijing with a colleague to discuss technical cooperation with our counterparts in a Chinese government agency. The technical part of the talks was carried out, as expected, in various functional dialects of International Business English, but the opening of the meeting took the form of a welcoming speech in elegant, very formal, French by a senior official of the host organisation, which I suspect none of her Chinese colleagues could understand. My Dutch colleague had to do some swift thinking to come up with a reply in kind: I was impressed that he remembered to start with "Madame le directeur-général, mesdames et messieurs...", the lady being of a generation to consider any other form of her title a terrible solecism.

That experience sums up a lot of preconceptions about the roles of English and French in the world of international communication. French comes loaded with style, protocol and status and the suggestion that Metternich and Talleyrand will be joining the meeting shortly; English lives in the world of Powerpoint presentations and pragmatic solutions. The directeur-général was entitled to assume that we, as representatives of an international organisation, would understand French, and she was also reminding us and her own subordinates that she had the enormous prestige of being a graduate of the Sorbonne. But she was perhaps exposing herself as a kind of dinosaur, one of the last representatives of the generations that were educated to believe that a good knowledge of French was all you needed in international discussions between educated people.

And of course, none of those preconceptions are entirely true, as Nadeau and Barlow set out to show in this follow-up to their dissection of modern France (Sixty million Frenchmen can't be wrong, 2003). Although it's presented as a history of the language, the historical part of the story is fairly perfunctory, and a good half of the book is given to a social and political examination of the status of French as a global language since 1945. They remind us how widely French is still spoken as a first or second language in many parts of the world, and how many students continue to learn it (voluntarily or not...). They look at the way the French-speaking community in Québec woke from centuries of self-isolation to become a dynamic political and cultural force in the 1960s, at the way French has survived the end of colonialism in North and West Africa, at the influence of French international schools, the Alliance française, and the Francophonie, at the French communities in Belgium and Switzerland, and at the unexpected importance of French in some countries where it doesn't have any formal standing, like Israel and Romania, or even the USA, where it is still in fourth place as a household language (after English, Spanish and Chinese).

French is still clearly very far from being at a dead end in the world at large, and a lot of that continued good health is due to clever language-promotion by governments and NGOs, but Nadeau and Barlow seem less confident about the health of French at home: the French are still inclined to get hung up on sterile discussions about language purism and ignore the fact that the world has moved on since the days of Molière-Racine-Corneille (whose works, as they remind us, French students only know through editions in which the spelling has been updated and standardised to nineteenth-century norms). The Académie française gets a particularly hard time: as far as Nadeau and Barlow are concerned, the Immortels are a bunch of amateurs who have been doing nothing in particular since 1635, and not doing it very well. They contrast this destructive conservatism with the open approach of the Office québécois de la langue française, which spends its time trying to come up with practical French terms for new concepts that would otherwise require borrowings from English.

As in their earlier book, the text is marred by imprecisions, minor errors and editorial slips (at one point they even manage to write "Indonesia" when they mean "Indochina"!), and they repeat themselves a bit, but on the whole it's a useful and very readable book, and it covers quite a few topics I haven't read much about elsewhere. ( )

An interesting and entertaining book, marred however by some typos and factual errors, e.g., muraille is not actually a loanword. These errors (or at least the ones I caught) are concentrated in earlier chapters, and in their defense, the authors explicitly say they are not linguists. Overall, this book succeeded in the goal of getting me interested in French. ( )

In this opus, the Canadian authors (one francophone, one anglophone) describe French's 300 year odyssey, through its history, evolution, spread across the world and current impacts and legacy. Looking at both the positive and negative, with a special attention to North America and Africa, the book uncovers fascinating stories, wonderful discoveries and sobering facts that show how French has shaped the geopolitical landscape, emerging as a counterweight to English's hegemony.
A worthwhile read! ( )

What I personally took from this read were two significant details about French today: first, that Quebec keeps French modern and up-to-date, and second, that France cares more about considering its language defeated by anglomania than making sure "French from France" is the most modern, efficient French to speak. ( )

As a double major in French and linguistics, this was right up my alley. This book traces the fascinating history of the French language, debunking myths and dropping interesting anecdotes along the way. ( )