DInce the adoption in April by the European Affairs Committee of the National Assembly of a resolution calling for “to make French the sole working language of the European Union”, the language question has once again come back to the forefront. shot of the French political debate.
Supported by the deputy (The Republicans) Julien Aubert, the resolution invites the government to “Initiate negotiations with the members of the European Council” to reserve for the French language only the privileged status enjoyed today by English, German and French. Following this vote in committee, many voices were raised in France to denounce the problematic or even “Monstrous” of the status quo [selon les propos du philosophe Michel Guérin dans une tribune au Monde parue le 9 octobre].
Weakening of cultural diversity
While only 1% of European citizens [depuis le Brexit] today have English as their mother tongue, more than 80% of the documents produced by the European Commission are initially in English. This very real imbalance challenges and deserves attention. In 2005, the Geneva economist François Grin already underlined [dans son rapport sur « L’enseignement des langues comme politique publique »] that the dominance of English in Europe created highly dissymmetrical financial and cultural flows, while tending to weaken cultural diversity. With Brexit, these flows now mainly benefit territories outside the Union, the United Kingdom and the United States in the lead.
However, despite the magnitude of the problem, it is quite clear that the recent French proposal will not generate much enthusiasm in the rest of Europe. Those who do not completely ignore it will laugh at it or get annoyed by it. The initiative could even, ultimately, have the opposite effect to that expected.
In a European Union which has always ostensibly displayed its multilingualism, the use of English, both an international lingua franca and the language of a major Member State, was, until Brexit, ambiguous. Since then, paradoxically, this role has become clearer: the language of each and every person, taught to the vast majority of young Europeans as a second language, “Euro-English”, despite its many faults, can now claim a certain internal neutrality, an essential quality in a political space based on negotiation and consensus.
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