Comments on 'But Where Does That Leave French?'

• What about French?
• Posted by Bruce Beatie , Professor emeritus at Cleveland State University on May 5, 2008 at 6:20am EDT

• Professor Straight's analysis seems accurate, and his suggestions are good ones. But he is preaching to the choir. The only people who can effect changes in the way languages are taught within the K-12 system in the United States are local school boards, who are dependent on local voters for funding through property taxes. The higher education audience Professor Straight is addressing can do little--and too many of them are themselves blind to the need for language competence in a global world.

• Posted by Richard Shryock , Chair at Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State Univ. (Virginia Tech) on May 5, 2008 at 9:30am EDT

• I would like to address one portion of Dr. Bright’s essay that repeats a fallacy about foreign languages. His use of figures from the MLA report suggest that the need for foreign languages is a zero-sum game. He comes to the usual and inaccurate conclusion about the decline of French (which is also frequently made about German). The MLA report he cites indicates that French enrollments in the US are increasing not decreasing (despite what the anonymous e-mail says that showed up in his in-box one day). The 2008 ACTFL Student Survey Report reveals that the French is the most desired language by high school students with Italian second and Spanish third. Based on absolute numbers and on student interest, more resources should be spent on teaching French nationwide. The same is true for other languages that are often presented in many contexts as “having been important” such as German and Russian. The role of these languages has not diminished: they still are important and need to continue to be funded. New languages have been added to the list of important languages we should make widely available. We need to understand the world in its diversity and not just focus on one or two languages (as has been the case up until now).

  Many administrators, such as those who made the regretful mistake to cut German at USC, fail to understand the implications of change in the world. Our students need to have a broader variety of languages to choose from than ever before and they need to have the opportunity to study at high levels in each language. If a school moves resources from German or French to Chinese, it does not move a school forward. (In fact with a shift of a fixed amount of resources, language competency of students is decreased as it takes longer in the Category IV languages like Chinese, Japanese and Arabic to achieve the same level of proficiency as in other languages.)

  Rethinking the study of languages should occur within a larger examination of how resources are allocated within schools. Every institution has limited funds to work with, but seeking the solution in rearranging finite resources among languages is not realistic. If a reallocation of finite resources is to occur, it will have to be from other disciplines to foreign languages. The world has changed and how we allocate money for education needs to reflect that change.

• Posted by christopher sharrock on May 5, 2008 at 9:45am EDT

• From a British perspective, this paper is a timely call to action. The teaching and learning of languages other than English has fallen off in our state schools. Like Americans we seem to have assumed everyone wants to learn our language (although if Americans and British spoke different languages to each other, I don’t know where the British would be).

  I have spent the past nine months researching the internationalisation of Higher Education and one of the subjects that I have explored is the supremacy of English as a language of instruction and research. While this supremacy is essentially down to the power of US culture, HE and research is currently dominated by American English. European HEIs are starting to develop programmes of study taught in English (the number has tripled in the last five years and is now somewhere around the 2,500 mark). The Scandinavian countries have led the way in these developments. This reliance on the ubiquity of English hasn’t always helped US academics and researchers. As Altbach points out, (writing about the Carnegie Report, in which 90% of non-US researchers thought it was essential to read foreign language papers and journals, as opposed to 62% of US academics) “American academics do not often cite works by scholars in other countries in their research. The American research system is remarkably insular.”

  But the dominance of English as a language of instruction is no more guaranteed than the dominance of the US film industry. Bollywood makes about 800 feature films a year- in a wide variety of languages and dialects- against the 200 or so in the US.

  By 2004 China had 20 million undergraduate students, making it the world’s largest supplier of HE. It had proposed to have 54,000 PhD graduates by 2005 (although it has recently capped this at 50,000). This puts the number of Chinese PhDs at about the same scale as those of the US. While the quality of these PhDs may not be as good at the moment as those from US HEIs, it is only a matter of time before China engages in high level, high quality research on a large scale, in Mandarin. With a billion inhabitants this will make it a world leader.

  English is currently spoken by about a billion people world-wide. Mandarin Chinese is also spoken by about a billion people. Research carried out by the Linguasphere Observatory in 2006 showed that in addition to these two languages, Hindi and Urdu had 900 million speakers, Spanish and Portuguese had 750 million speakers, with Russian at 320 million and Arabic at 250 million speakers. French had 125 million.

  There are already organisations in existence to rebalance the dominance of America and/or the English language (ASEAN, MERCUSOR, The European Higher Education Area). If regionalisation continues and strengthens then regional languages may assume a greater importance (alongside English) in trade, education and research. While the most obvious focuses for regional development are Latin America and Asia, Francophone Africa cannot be ignored.

  How US and British secondary or tertiary education serve their students (or their countries, or the economies of their countries) in the light of regional developments without the introduction of such schemes for language teaching as Professor Straight proposes, I do not know. Those of us in HE need to make a convincing case to secondary educators, funders and politicians for the introduction of language teaching as early as possible. Otherwise we will have to shoulder the burden, the cost and the criticism when HE is deemed to have failed to ‘keep us competitive’.

  As for education’s real contribution to the world, then surely it is as Professor Straight puts it- making the world a safer, healthier place in which we all have a better understanding of each others’ values and cultures: a world where those values and cultures aren’t subsumed by some larger, homogeneous culture (we can’t just go from ‘The American Way’ to ‘The Chinese Way’) but where difference is valued and respected. To do this will take more than language instruction (although that’s a good place to start). It requires a Transnational Education System: one in which students- wherever they are from- and staff are enabled to develop skills, knowledge, attitudes and values that allow them to act as both local and global citizens (perhaps we should call it ‘glocalisation’). It needs an educational system that is diverse in approaches to teaching and learning and sensitive to cultural differences.

• Posted by Lenuta Giukin on May 5, 2008 at 5:15pm EDT

• 1. Obviously there are discrepencies in statistics because the numbers in this article are faaaar from being accurate.
  2. Why is Africa constantly left out of the present and future picture of the world?
  3. Regional dialects of French & Spanish should be taught/will be taught? For now, students have a hard time learning the classic French or Spanish!!!
  4. Start learning foreign languges early, in childhood? We'd all like to see that, of course!!!

• Posted by Catherine Porter , First Vice President at Modern Language Association on May 5, 2008 at 5:20pm EDT

• While I share the concern with the relative decline in French studies--French has been the focus of my career as a professor and translator--my greater concern, like Professor Straight’s, is with the relative position of foreign language study in our educational system today.

  In a major report released last May (“Foreign Languages and Higher Education: New Structures for a Changed World”) the Modern Language Association advocates significant revisions of the postsecondary foreign language curriculum, recommending more integration of content with language study and expansion of content to include not only literature but history, geography, and culture. These changes are intended not simply to address the nation’s so-called language deficit but to increase the number of Americans who have the linguistic skills and deep understanding of other cultures needed to meet the challenges of globalization.

  It is extraordinarily inefficient, however, to try to fulfill the demand for translingual and transcultural competence by focusing on higher education alone. If the study of at least one language and culture, in addition to English, becomes part of every school child’s core K-12 curriculum, the United States will have a globally competent citizenry on an unprecedented scale, and there will be a vast pool of experienced language learners, many of whom can be called on to acquire additional languages quickly in response to national needs. The challenge facing all of us is to persuade as many people as possible--friends and family, colleagues and neighbors, local school board members and state legislators--that it is high time to begin implementing Stephen Straight’s admirably ambitious and eminently feasible program.

• Posted by Katalina Pataki on May 5, 2008 at 6:55pm EDT

• Will HUngarian as a non-Indo-European language die? I am quite sure that it will. My Yankee father, when we asked whether to take French or Spanish, asked whether we would live in Chad or frequent French restaurants. He had learned it in the east at school. We learned Spanish, in addition to English. Our Hungarian mother, dropped in the middle of Texas, never taught it to us, her children, saying we would never use it. We have visited her native country often, but none of us ever mastered the poly-consonant, difficult language, to the dismay of the natives. I see the decline in Hungarian food, culture, and even to some degree, the country, and would appreciate some response.
  Thank you.

• On the future of the French language
• Posted by Luis Montes on May 6, 2008 at 6:05am EDT

• Sir,
  The ranking of French as an international language is totally artificial. The only reason the Francophonie exists is because of the lavish subsidies handed out by the French state to the corrupt elits of their former colonies. I have also noticed that in the US the main advocators for maintaning the French language among the so called Big Three are, nor surpraisingly, either professors of French or the self- styled, woodyallenesque, high "cultured" class of the East Coast and their imitators elsewhere. It does not sound very promising for the future of the French language in any case.

• French
• Posted by Chad Wozniak on May 7, 2008 at 5:30am EDT

• I think it would be regrettable if French is abandoned as a major second language for the U.S. Not only do several nearby countries (Canada, Haiti, the French Antilles) speak French, but so does half of post-colonial Africa, and of course France, Belgium, and Switzerland.

  I agree that the teaching of other languages should be given much higher priority than it has at present in the U.S. educational system. My own expectation is that a century hence, virtually all the world's people will be speaking at least two of the following: English, Spanish, Mandarin. English is already spoken as a second language by more people than any other, with as many as 1.5 billion non-native speakers; but Spanish is by far the world's fastest growing language, and Mandarin will spread for obvious reasons.

• Posted by Concerned singer / teacher on May 7, 2008 at 4:15pm EDT

• A perhaps unexpected casualty of the shutting down of language departments will be the foreign language literacy of classical singers. Students earning voice performance degrees are expected to have a basic level of fluency in Italian, German, and French, and those earning advanced degrees are required to take that study to a higher level in at least one language. We cannot practice our art with any integrity without an understanding of the languages in which we sing and an opportunity to perfect our diction in those languages. The majority of our standard repertoire has foreign language texts. A student in a major urban area may have access to language coaches who could tutor him in more unusual languages, but these three are considered essential for us as a starting point. Where are we to send our students for this training, if it is not offered at our own institutions?

• Author's replies to Comments
• Posted by Steve Straight , Vice Provost for UG Ed & International Affairs at Binghamton University, State University of New York on May 9, 2008 at 4:40pm EDT

• It’s been more the 24 hours now since the last one came in, so I’ll offer, in the order that they were posted, replies to the above comments on my essay.

  Bruce Beatie is of course correct that the most ambitious and costly educational change my essay promotes—a commitment to the early study and continued meaningful use of languages other than English by all college-bound students—requires that my proposal reach the K-12 educational leadership, the parents of the targeted children, and the taxpayers who would have to pay for it. I am seeking ways to accomplish this, but in the meantime I am seeking to enlighten the members of the higher education audience who remain unaware, or perhaps even as Beatie puts it, “blind to the need for language competence in a global world.” We can’t hope to get the K-12 community to commit to multilingual education until colleges and universities reinforce that commitment by means of favored admissions standards, language-proficiency graduation requirements, study-abroad scholarships, and ubiquitous use of materials in languages other than English and inclusion of multicultural perspectives throughout college education.

  Richard Shryock correctly observes that the rise of languages other than Spanish, French, and German in the college curriculum has not occurred at the expense of loss of overall enrollments in the Big Three. Quite the contrary: all three have increased their enrollments in the last decade. What has gone down, for French and German, though not for Spanish, has been their proportional share of the increases that have occurred in language enrollments. Heritage language learners and external sources of increased interest in a wider array of world languages have resulted in a welcome growth in their curricular presence and student enrollments. I was careful not to say that absolute levels of interest in French and German have declined (though advanced study of them has fallen off). Rather, the patterns of rapid growth in many other languages, and the predicted continued rise of favorable external forces, suggest that they will gradually be supplanted over the coming decades. Shryock’s observation that French remains the language of choice by American high school students, Italian and Spanish second and third, underlines the point of my essay. Those three (and especially Spanish, because it is the only one of the three that is expected to increase its global proportion of speakers in the next forty years) are okay places to start (given the great vocabulary similarities they share with English). But this should be in kindergarten. By high school most students should already be fluent in one of these, or some other language, and using it daily in their studies, and college-bound students should already have begun study of a third language. On this scenario, of course, the inclusion of new languages will not need to occur at the expense of the ones we are already teaching. Shryock rightly implies that this expansion will require a sizeable expansion in the curricular role of language study and, I would add, meaningful language use throughout the curriculum rather than the shuffling of a fixed amount language-instruction resources from one language to another. This might increase the number of languages taught, but not their role elsewhere in students’ education nor, as Shryock points out, students’ average level of language proficiency (because they lack the vocabulary, alphabetic, phonetic, and other similarities to English that characterize the Big Three). Multilingual education will require changes in the starting-time, duration, and curricular integration of languages that go far beyond the substitution of one language with another.

  Christopher Sharrock’s comment rivals my essay in the breadth and depth of the information it contains. I thank him for his supportive remarks and useful details. He makes some sobering points about the rise of English as the lingua academica for the world, made worse by the distressing rise of US-only reading habits among American academics. These trends confirm and increase the long-standing shift that language study at the college level has made over the last 40 years from its traditional role as an essential ingredient for graduate scholarly success to a new role as an essential component of success as a college-educated global actor. When I was in college—and graduate school!—language study provided access to scholarly work in the sciences and social sciences. Languages still play this role, but to a lesser extent than in the past, in the humanities and fine arts, and fieldwork-defined disciplines continue to need languages as tools for the gathering of primary data and communication with research subjects. But, in a way that revives their origins as components of “general education” while adding to that a recognition of their increasing importance in a shrinking world, languages serve as the keys to open up the entire curriculum to global cultural content and engaged international activities. For this purpose, the details Sharrock provides on numbers of speakers of the world’s languages show that Chinese, Hindi/Urdu, Portuguese, and Arabic are grossly underrepresented in American higher education, and the severity of this underrepresentation only promises to increase as the 21st century proceeds unless we can reform quickly.

  Lenuta Giukin fairly observes that the statistics I have cited are often inaccurate and difficult to interpret with certainty, but I submit that for all their failings they tell a sorry story. I will stick to my position that the regional dialects of the colonial languages of Africa and elsewhere, wrongfully suffer neglect in favor of their Western European “classic” forms, especially because of the cultural differences that thereby go unexamined. I agree, however, with Giukin that the indigenous languages of Asia receive far more attention than those of Africa (or, for that matter, the Americas, the Middle East, and even Europe). This has mostly to do with numbers: of native speakers, of U.S. heritage speakers, of immigrant remittances, and of trade-volume figures. However, Giukin rightly implies that we must strive to include every language and culture we possibly can in our multilingual educational scheme, even if some of these will appear only in a select few schools and colleges.

  Catherine Porter’s supportive remarks come from a singularly authoritative source, and I am grateful to her for bringing the May 2007 Modern Language Association report into the discussion. Clearly the success of my “admirably ambitious” (thank you) program can prove “eminently feasible” only with the strong support and participation of the language-teaching establishment. All I can add to Porter’s eloquent plea to bring these ideas to “as many people as possible” is that my vision can be realized only if all teachers (not just teachers of language) embrace the examination of other cultural perspectives and the inclusion of non-English sources. This will mean empowering students to employ the skills they’ve learned in the language classroom to the meaningful use of materials that the non-language teacher may not be able to understand. This loss of control can be a bit scary but, where it’s been allowed, also amazingly rewarding to all.

  Katalina Pataki’s Yankee father shared my belief that, for most schools in most parts of the U.S. the kindergarten language of choice will rightly be Spanish. I’ve even been known to say that we should make English and Spanish the official languages of the U.S., that both languages should be used everywhere in our society, that every school child should pursue two-way immersion education so as to become fluent in both by the end of elementary school, and that materials in both languages should be routinely assigned at all levels of education in every field of study. As for Pataki’s question about the possible demise of Hungarian, her mother’s native language, I fear that this can be warded off only by people like her mother. If other immigrants decline, as she did, to pass the language on to their children, then its prospects as a viable “heritage language” in the schools will remain dim, and the rise of English as the new European lingua franca will diminish the likelihood of an external push to teach Hungarian now that it has joined the European Union. I suspect Pataki won’t be happy with this answer, but she did press for one.

  Luis Montes strikes a jarring but familiar chord. Recent conversations in the EU have revealed that the prominence of French in EU affairs outstrips its numerical and extra-European importance and is maintained largely out of respect for its historical role as the language of European and world diplomacy. Montes, I believe, goes too far in accusing France of keeping French alive around the world by bribing or otherwise propping up Francophone colonial elites, but it is true that France does subsidize the global study of French. Finally, although Montes again engages in unnecessarily insulting rhetoric, my essay reveals that I, as a product of an academic family (in the Midwest, though, not the East Coast), do harbor a somewhat out-of-date affection for French. It was this, after all, that kept me from writing this essay a few decades earlier than I did, and it was an explicit question about the privileged status of French in U.S. schools that finally triggered my somewhat regretful admission that that status is no longer justified.

  Chad Wozniak, fortunately and rightly, urges us to maintain French in the curriculum because of its prominence in Africa, North America, and the Caribbean, as well as Western Europe, even though he voices a well-justified prediction that English, Mandarin, and Spanish will be the top three world languages a century hence. Further in that vein, however, I regret to report that the same sort of projections yield the conclusion that of the six official languages of the United Nations—Arabic, Chinese (Mandarin), English, French, Russian, and Spanish—only one will suffer a loss in the absolute number of speakers: French. And that will happen not by 2108 but by 2050!

  Finally, an anonymous “Concerned singer / teacher” poignantly bemoans the prospect of “the shutting down of language departments” because of the loss of access to language instruction in Italian, German, and French for “classical singers.” Fortunately, though I don’t know what other examples there may be, both the University of Southern California, which this year closed its German department, and Drake University, which several years ago closed its modern languages department, have continued to offer their students instruction in the languages involved. The major may be gone, but an aspiring Marian Anderson can still learn how to sing Puccini, Wagner, and Rameau. However, the portions of the current Metropolitan Opera production of Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, that I heard last weekend on NPR compel me to report that the spoken German dialogue, as opposed to the singing, in this Singspiel sounded distinctly non-native. Whether or not my judgment is accurate in this case, as a former voice student, soloist, and chorister I can say with confidence that singers typically learn—from their voice teachers—the “sung” version of a language, characterized by distinctive consonant and vowel pronunciations and stylized conventions of emphasis and emotion, rather than the version they would learn from a language teacher per se.

• "Where does that leave French?"
• Posted by Marilyn J. Conwell , Professor of foreign Languages & Linguistics at Rosemont College on May 22, 2008 at 1:30pm EDT

• Let us be realistic, French no longer has the dominance in US schools that it once had. On the other hand, if we look at world-wide use of language, English and French dominate on nearly all continents. Most educated people in the world have a strong command of at least three languages: their own, English and French. Spanish is more important than French in our hemisphere, but many business people from South America tell me that French is necessary when seeking financial relationships outside their continent.
  A business women told me that when she was in the near-east and became ill, no doctor could be found who spoke English, but when she suggested French as a possibility, help was immediately available.
  We need to teach our students HOW to learn a language efficiently and encourage them to have at least two foreign languages if we want to prepare them for the international climate of today. French is still the second world language in terms of the number of countries in which it is an essential communication tool. Once students become confident that they can learn to communicate in another language, they will have the ability to approach a new language with confidence.

• Posted by Tom , Analyst at Global services company on July 10, 2008 at 11:35am EDT

• This is an interesting article and comments from learned professionals in language education but here is what I have learned over my 55 years.

  My language background is: I have taken French in every grade from 1st through 12th. I have 12 credits in French at a major university. I can read French somewhat. I can only understand it when it is spoken slowly, without a heavy accent and in simple sentences. My French writing is horrible. And my spoken French is simple and slow coming.

  Over my 55 years, I have spent 4 days in France and 8 days in Quebec City. I eat at French restaurants frequently. At work I have a global position in which I support our offices in many nations, two being our Paris and Brussels offices.

  I'm sorry to report to you that the most value I have received from my French education is reading a French menu. This is not meant to be a flip statement. French was helpful in France because just attempting to speak it was received favorably by everyone except the man at the camera booth at the Eiffel Tower. It was helpful in Quebec City but as soon as someone realize I had difficulty with French they immediately switched to English without any show of irritation for doing so. At the office, French is never spoken. Neither is Russian, Japanese, Mandarin, Arabic, German, or Spanish. I am not saying this is good or bad, it is just the reality of it. Since most waiters in French restaurants do not speak French, I find it the most helpful because I can at least accomplish that.

  This is what I received for studying French for over 1,000 hours over my lifetime at a cost of whatever was spent by my elementary and high schools plus the $12,000 I personally spent in college. I'll leave it to you to judge whether it was worth the time and money.

  What enables the Europeans to have better command and interest in other languages is their proximity to one another. This proximity creates a need for learning another language and more exposure to using that language. Most people in the United States do not have this necessity or exposure except maybe those along the Mexican and Quebec borders. Resources might be better spent in learning the language and culture of our own states. Then maybe we might not think Californians are all crazy left wingers, Pennsylvanians are gun-toting, bible-thumping bigots, West Virginians are all incestual, and Southerners are all bigots.

  As they say in my hometown of Picksburgh, Pensivania:

  Molahta things to say. Yens think onnat. I gotda redd up the place. :~)

• Final Comments?
• Posted by H Stephen Straight , Vice Provost at Binghamton University on September 3, 2008 at 5:15am EDT

• I couldn’t have asked for a better “last two” commentators on my essay than Marilyn J Conwell of Rosemont College and “Tom, Analyst at a Global services company.” Professor Conwell rightly observes that French continues to be, especially for doctors and other well-educated people, a language of global significance beyond the limits of Francophonie (the many native speakers of French around the world). Going on thirty years ago, as a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Bucharest I found my French of great value in interacting with senior colleagues whose early education privileged French over English, and I suspect that this continues to be true in many countries, especially in Polynesia, Southeast Asia, and the Arab world. I’m not sorry I studied French, and it should continue to be among the languages we study.
  Tom, as if replying more to Marilyn than to me, complains that his study of French left him with writing that is “horrible”, speaking that is “simple and slow coming”. (Ironically, though, Tom mentions that his spoken French, bad as he feels it is, often exceeds that of the waiters in a French restaurant. I’ve been there.) Although his professional responsibilities include supporting offices in Paris and Brussels, Tome has spent only 12 days in a French-speaking environment (4 in France and 8 in Quebec), and feels that “reading a French menu” has been the greatest benefit for his many hours of French instruction (more even than my own despite its being my most-studied language).
  On the other hand, Tom admits that he “can read French somewhat” and that “just attempting to speak it was received favorably by [nearly] everyone”. Consider how differently Tom might feel about his French if he had spent a semester in a French-speaking environment (whether French or Canadian), and if his French had been employed as a source of learning materials across the curriculum during his college years, rather than being limited to “12 [more] credits in French”. Imagine how he might have been able to help his colleagues in Paris and Brussels with their work if he had used his reading knowledge to critique the materials they presented to customers. Tom’s self-reported limitations in listening skills appear to bolster my suggestion that dialect varieties be included, while at the same time his focus on how often a language is spoken in his office reflect the widespread bias toward the spoken over the written language. The ability to pick up on newspaper headlines, or to get the gist of a corporate annual report, or to appreciate a culture-laden joke (even when uttered in English) can prove far more valuable than the best-pronounced greeting or compliment.
  Yes, Europeans have the advantage of geographic proximity to speakers of many languages, but the whole point of my essay is that the Internet and other vehicles and outcomes of globalization have made geography less relevant than global commerce, cybernetic cultural contact, and international coöperation as spurs to the learning and use of languages. Yes, colleges also need to disabuse students regarding the stereotypes they harbor about their fellow Americans, but let me point out that my own university’s two-part Global Vision requirement includes U.S. Pluralism and Global Interdependencies.

• Posted by Tom , Analyst at Global Services company on September 11, 2008 at 5:40pm EDT

• Professor Straight,

  Can you tell me how much money your proposals will cost a local school district?

  What subjects are you recommending be dropped to make room for a third language?

  Do you have a list of other language schools one can attend for at least that one semester? Or do those schools need to be created. And, if so, where is the money coming from to build these schools.

  What is your plan to help low income families pay for room and board at these other language schools if they are not located in their neighborhood?

  I think you missed my point so let me make it clearer. I spent a great deal of time and money learning something that has been of no value to me in my lifetime. And your plan would have me learn yet another useless language. You can argue I'd be a better person for it but couldn't I be a better person learning something useful to me like economics. Economics is hardly touched in K12 and only one or two classes are required in college. I needed a foreign language only 12 days of my life but I need economics every day just to manage my 401(k).

  Your plan would add a tremendous burden to taxpayers, especially for us here in New York. This at a time when the state is cutting your university's budget and your liberal arts professors are complaining (and rightfully so) that they are not paid as much as the science, business, and econmic professors.

  Should taxpayers fund learning a third language or should we pay professors what they need to live on?

  With limited resources, what should our priorities be?

• applause
• Posted by Jeff Ruth , Chair, FL Dept. at East Stroudsburg University of PA on October 24, 2008 at 5:15am EDT

• Lucid, lucid. Thanks so much for these comments. I would like to read more by this author, or speak with him.

  Jeff Ruth

• French - a 'Freedom language'
• Posted by Dr. Kian-Harald Karimi , University of Heidelberg at Romanisches Seminar on May 14, 2009 at 1:15pm EDT

• I am afraid, but an American debate on French is necessarily a highly biased project. Many American citizens hostile against the war on Iraq referred to the French position, while Republican reacted bitterly against France's policy. Studying French in the US is then a political act. I get the impression that some Americans feel embarrassed about a French language that challenges the world domination of English. This is also a political issue because all we know that the leadership of USA will not last for ever.
  French is not a dying language seems. In fact French was until the 19th century the language of world wide élites. In the last century English took this place spoken by an increasing number of indivuals and by becoming an official status in many countries. But French did not die. It is the official or administrative language in more than fourty countries. It is still a very important idiom in the UN and the European Union. So simply follow the trend set by some eager American patriots during the Bush administration by calling French fries "Freedom fries" and French language "Freedom language".