<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <body> MARK ABLEY The Story of French By Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow Knopf Canada, 483 pages, $36 Astonishing though it may seem, millions of people love this kind of thing. Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow are not among them. One of the many refreshing qualities of their jaunty book The Story of French is their insistence that purists -- of which French has more than its share -- are wrong to believe that the health of a language has anything to do with correctness. A language's health depends on the vibrancy of its usage -- yet in a dictée, "Usage is not the point. The whole idea of dictation is to prove that one can write sans faute -- even at a level of language and vocabulary that has no use in the real world of conversation, culture or work." Nadeau and Barlow are married Montrealers who commit journalism in both official languages. She was an Ontarian with shaky French, he a Québécois from Sherbrooke when they met at McGill University more than 15 years ago. Researching this book, they travelled far and wide -- and although they're not the most vivid travel writers, The Story of French benefited enormously from their journeys. They write with authority about the condition of French in Algeria, its usefulness in Senegal and its refusal to die in Louisiana -- not to mention the accents of Belgium and Switzerland, and the argot of Parisian youth. If you've read The Story of English, The Stories of English, Mother Tongue or similar works, you won't be surprised by the early chapters of The Story of French. Barlow and Nadeau competently describe the language's emergence out of Latin, its wild creativity during the Renaissance, the successful attempts to tame and "normalize" it in the 17th century, and so on. I thought I knew this history pretty well, but I was surprised to find that in France during the revolutionary 1790s, only three million out of 28 million citizens spoke the language fluently, and even fewer knew how to write it. As the book goes along, history becomes less important than politics. And what lifts The Story of French above mere competence is the authors' alertness to culture as a political force, their willingness to argue at the drop of a hat, and their determination to show that much of what outsiders commonly believe about French is untrue. Take the Académie Française, for instance. As Nadeau and Barlow explain, it's not a sort of high-flown language police; it lacks the power to pass any laws on language use. The Alliance Française, it turns out, is not a government agency but a private, still-expanding network promoting French culture in more than 1,000 cities worldwide. Or consider la Francophonie. If anglophones think of it at all, they probably dismiss it as a Parisian ploy to retain some influence on an English-speaking planet. Nadeau and Barlow show why that's a gross underestimation of a surprisingly useful body. Time and again, the authors point out the strength and vitality of French today. While I suspect they place too much stress on the number of international bodies where the language can still be used, it's crucial to realize that French may have as many fluent speakers in Africa as in Europe. Not many anglophones know that French has made greater strides in Africa after national independence than during the colonial era. Back home, Nadeau and Barlow eloquently defend Quebec's language policies; they're right to criticize anglophones who still use the phrase "Bill 101" nearly 30 years after the language charter became law. In broad strokes, The Story of French is both lively and salutary. In terms of detail, alas, it's riddled with error. The authors perpetrate a few linguistic howlers: Even within France, they fail to distinguish dialects from languages, and it's a terrible mistake to say that many African languages lack "a complete grammar system." If "African democracy may sound like an oxymoron" is meant as a joke, it falls miserably flat; otherwise, it's simply racist. Books about language ought to be stylish, and this one is not. "The apparently bottomless human resources of the St. Lawrence River valley spawned a smaller subgroup of French Canadians" is an all-too-typical line. And how could Knopf Canada let phrases like "a collectivity that lived in a territory" lurch into print? I could, believe me, go on nitpicking for many further paragraphs -- which would be both a shame and an injustice. Read this book, and you'll have the pleasure of discovering why gopher, zydeco, saloon and Dixie all derive from French. You'll learn why Cajuns urge each other not to drop the potato. And you'll find that, at the height of the Second World War, Franklin Delano Roosevelt urged Mackenzie King to make French Canadians speak English. </body> |