by
Julie Barlow & Jean-Benoit Nadeau
First English Language Edition
– published in the USA in 2006
A
fascinating exploration of the historical and cultural development of the
French language from the bestselling authors of Sixty Million Frenchmen Can´t
Be Wrong.
Imagine
a language that is watched over by a group of forty “Immortals,” a language
with rules so complex that few people ever completely master it, whose status
as the world´s lingua franca has been declining for two centuries, whose use in
global institutions is waning and whose speakers are so insecure they pass laws
banning the use of other languages and spend millions of tax-payers´ dollars to
make sure it gets used in literature, music and film. Now imagine a language
that is second only to English for the number of countries where it is spoken
officially, surpassing both Spanish or Arabic, a language that is the official
tongue of two G-7 countries and three European nations, that is employed
alongside English in most international institutions and that is the number-two
choice of language students across the planet – a language with two million
teachers and 100 million students worldwide, and whose number of speakers has
tripled in the last fifty years.
This paradox is the backdrop for The Story of French, in which bilingual
Canadian authors Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow unravel the mysteries of a
language that has maintained its global influence in spite of the ascendancy of
English. Mixing historical analysis with journalistic observation, and drawing
on their experiences living in and travelling to French-speaking countries,
they explore how the French language developed over the centuries, how it came
to be spoken in the Americas, Africa and Asia, and how it has maintained its
global appeal.
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