Macron unveils plan to boost French, ‘language of liberty’
PARIS: President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday unveiled plans to get more people speaking French, saying the ‘treasure shared by 700 million people’ belonged to all and should be given more prominence in the EU ahead of Brexit.
France’s youthful president has impressed foreign audiences with his near-flawless English, a language with which his predecessors — and the wider French public — have had a famously fraught relationship.
Yet while himself opting for English when addressing investors in Davos or being interviewed by the foreign press, the 40-yearold literature lover wants to get more people speaking his native tongue, particularly in Africa, seen as a wellspring of potential new French speakers.
In an hour-long speech to mark International Francophonie Day, Macron acknowledged that French was still associated by some, particularly in Africa, with colonialism and the autocratic regimes that Paris propped up for decades after independence.
“It would be arrogant to say that France is only the language of liberty” he said.
“People have tortured in French and done wonderful things in French,” he said, adding that the fact that some tyrants speak French “does not absolve them” for their deeds.
He also attempted to fend off accusations that France still acts as if it is the sole proprietor of a language spoken from Cameroon in west Africa to New Caledonia in the southwest Pacific.
French, he said, had ‘liberated itself from France’ to become a ‘world language’, he said.
French is currently the world’s fifth most spoken language after Mandarin Chinese, English, Spanish and Arabic, according to official French estimates based on the population of countries where French is an official language.