Julie Barlow

Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow is an incredibly well researched piece about how the French work, behave, and live. The history, French system, and future are written very well and reads very much like a textbook. It's informing, gives insights into many aspects of the French (history, cultural practices, language, health, etc.), and can open your eyes into the French culture as a whole.

Personally, I couldn't connect with this book well. I wasn't engaged and got bored easily. It's the kind of book I'd need a professor to break down and explain. Perhaps in audiobook form, I might have been more engaged. Regardless, I can tell the research was well down and it is written well. It just didn't connect to me personally.

One star out of five. The book just isn't for me, hence the one star. For how well it's written, someone else will thoroughly enjoy it!… (lisätietoja)

A comprehensive book about France from a different perspective, that of 2 Canadians, one from Quebec and one from Ontario. Very interesting read from non-US authors whose research is thorough and accessibly presented. That said, this book will appeal more to the Francophile who wants to dig deeply into the roots of French society, politics and culture, and who is not looking for travel logs, house-restoration tales, or the woes of English-language speakers in France. Densely populated with statistics and inside information, the book may not be finished by those who are looking for a 'lighter' read. But a good addition to the library of books about France.… (lisätietoja)

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.… (lisätietoja)