future of French language?

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Lawrence of Arabia
oh lalalallalala quel chenit! eh spiff, ils sont pire que moi!

I have no idea what the future of the french language is, all I know is that 2 languages is better than 1 and 3 is better than 2 etc. I dont know if as an american it really matters what second langauge you take unless you are looking at a specific field ('peace' officer, obviously spanish)

well you can take one for economic reasons, or cultural reasons. Or just daily use. Or travel

For daily use - well Spanish really DOES come in handy, mor than youd think. economic - for most service fields, of course spanish. For military, diplo, intell the hot languages are Arabic, Farsi, Chinese, Russian. For tech im not sure - sounds like Japanese really is hot. Maybe Chinese, maybe German? For international Biz, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish probably. French, German, just behind. For natural science, I dont know - anything other than English these days? For humanities, etc, depends on your interests I guess. For Law, well Latin, of course. (Norman French not typically being a choice in high school)

For culture, it depends on your interests. POTM is interested in Japanese pop culture. It seems a reasonable economic choice as well, if not as hot as it was in the 1980's.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Oerdin
The thing is you can go to Quebec and Guadaloupe and everyone likely speaks English though they may pretend they don't.

I wouldnt count on that. We went to St. Martin, and i actually got to use my rusty French, the hotel clerk spoke no english. And that was an island where the Dutch side (where few spoke French) was practically within walking distance. Id imagine on Guadaloupe there are even more who dont speak English.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Lawrence of Arabia
Belgium (probably not that cool)

playing Victoria now. Fear my Walloon coal mines, my Flemish machine parts factory, and the excellent policies of the Liberale (sp?) Partij

[Lawrence of Arabia]

moi je pense qu'il nous faut un 'fil' pour les francophones

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by Oerdin


pas not pad. I took two years of French in Junior High and if the typo was any more complicated then that then I wouldn't have caught it.

I meant which of the two obvious typos

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by lord of the mark


Oh - yeah. Votres pensees. Votre pensee.

Your thoughts. Your thought.

Whatever. (how you say dat in French, Mr Smartie?)

Vos pensees. "Votres" is the possessive pronoun, used in place of a noun. "Vos" is the possessive article used to modify a noun.

Donnez moi vos pensees

or

Je vous ai donne mes pensees. Donnez moi les votres.

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by Lawrence of Arabia
moi je pense qu'il nous faut un 'fil' pour les francophones

Françithreadi

[Dufresne]

I hated french in high school. I took it to be different/awesomely cool since nearly everyone took Spanish and I had a grandfather from Quebec so I figured I could get all the answers from him. Well it turns out my french teacher was an evil anal retentive toad and its hard to get answers from my grandfather over the phone when the conversation mostly consisted of "What's je prend un cafe mean?", my grandfather:"What?", "Je prend un cafe?", My grandfather: "Why don't you learn Spanish." So I figured french was left to white trash of a higher caliber.

My lack of french wasn't a problem until I moved to Hampton Beach NH where tons of Quebeckers/Quebecoise (sp?) vacation. Which allowed me and my roommate to hit on a lot of girls with french accents. The whole "my grandfather came from Quebec we're paisanos!" really worked wonders here. (Un?)Fortunately I met one of these girls from Quebec fell in love and I'm now getting married to her. Of course her parents don't speak a word of English and quite a few of her friends don't either so I have the most wonderful joy of trying to learn french again.

So the moral of the story is everyone needs to learn french in high school because you might move to NH, meet a girl from Quebec, get married to her, and have no clue what some of her friends and relatives are saying to you. Which in some cases might be good.

[Spiffor]

As to the topic of the thread: IMO, French does have a future as an international language (not as a lingua franca however) for several reasons:

- there are quite a few elements in place in France for the country's renewal. I believe that in less than 10-20 years, France will be quite dynamic and attractive.

- Add to that the fact that most French people, even among the young, do somehow care for their language. Once France becomes internationally interesting again, it's unlikely that its culture merely mirrors the standards of the "world culture".

- Also, domestic cultural production should remain very significant in the meantime, meaning there will be a pool of experienced artists already in place when people abroad become intered in France again. Indeed, there's a strong public support for cultural production, which makes French culture more dynamic than most European cultures even today.

[VetLegion]

What did they say in the Matrix? Like sweeping the butt with silk?

I quite like the sound of French, it's one of the more pleasant languages to hear.

[DanS]

I took French in high school and college. I like the language, but if I were doing it again, I would take Spanish. I could use Spanish often here in DC.

Things have changed with regard to French in the US, mostly because Spanish has become much more attractive lately.

[GePap]

http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm

Acording to this site, 381 Million people worldwide speak French (France plus ex-empire). I think the language will survive fine on its own somehow.

[Vesayen]

France is no longer a world power economically, militarily or even politically.

French is unimportant. France is unimportant.

Chinese Japanese and German are all far better choices for our children to be prepared for the future.

[Frozzy]

Das fliegerkorps

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Originally posted by Vesayen
France is no longer a world power economically, militarily or even politically.

French is unimportant. France is unimportant.

Chinese Japanese and German are all far better choices for our children to be prepared for the future.

Ah, you had such a good point...until you mentioned German.

French is far, far more useful than German. An enormous percentage of the world's population is francaphone. Granted, most of them are in crappy African countries, but there are still lots of them.

German is spoken by -- Germans. And Austrians, who persist in the fantasy that they're not German. And many of those Germans speak English. German is useless for anyone outside the Fatherland except scholars and future Turkish guest workers.

Which is too bad, if only because my daughter liked German best of the three languages she's studied -- but no one offers it in school anymore.

It's worth noting that schools didn't use to teach languages because of their utility. It used to be that languages were taught because of their connection to our culture. That's one reason that, at the height of the Cold War, far more American public schools offered Latin than Russian. But times have changed, and I suspect French is headed the way of Latin -- and German.