Macron looks to Africa to promote French
PARIS — He’s France’s most anglophone president, who reaches for the language of the old foe when telling global audiences that “France is back”, or that he wants ecologically to “make our planet great again”.
Emmanuel Macron’s mastery of English has wowed foreign leaders, who are used to their French counterparts either refusing to speak a language they see as a symbol of cultural imperialism or doing so with an accent so thick it makes Inspector Clouseau sound like Prince Philip.
Yet despite English being his go-to language when abroad France’s energetic president is on a drive to boost the use of his native tongue.
On Tuesday, “International Francophonie Day”, he was schedule to set out his plan for promoting global use of French, which he sees as key to boosting France’s place on the world stage.
On a visit to Burkina Faso in November, he made an impassioned appeal to francophone Africans not to turn their backs on the language of the former colonial power by switching to English.
“To refuse the French language in order to make English fashionable on the African continent is to be blind to the future,” he declared.
“If we go about it right, France will be the first language in Africa and maybe even the world in the coming decades!”, he boldly predicted.
That’s a tall order for a language that was only the world’s sixth-most spoken language in 2014, after Chinese, English, Spanish and Arabic or Hindi, according to official French figures.
To make up the difference France is looking to Africa for a shot in the arm.
The African language?
Macron based his prediction on a study from The International Francophonie Organization which forecast that, due to explosive population growth in Africa, over one billion people will live in French-speaking countries by 2065, second only to countries that speak English.
Critics have described the statistics as misleading, noting that not all inhabitants of countries that have French as an official language speak what was once the language of diplomacy.
Macron is treading carefully, aware that any attempt to foist more French on former African colonies.
In Burkina Faso, the 40-year-old philosophy graduate said he was “from a generation that doesn’t come to tell Africans what to do”, and argued that “the French language is no longer solely French but also, maybe even more so, African”.
One of the main components of his “plan for French and multilingualism in the world” is investment in education in developing countries, particularly in Africa.
On a visit to Senegal in February, he pledged 200 million euros ($248 million) toward the Global Partnership for Education.