Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [223]
For all its faults (a standard system of Romanised spelling was specified only in 190125) it is this Malay which has become the official language of the state of Indonesia, under the wishful title of Bahasa Indonesia. Even today, though, only 17-30 million people there actually have it as a first language, perhaps a tenth of those who can use it as a second language. Compare this with the 75 million whose first language is Javanese, and the 726 languages that are listed as spoken somewhere within Indonesia. The Dutch, through their fitful policy, had succeeded in giving a common language to their old colony, but not their own.
La francophonie
La langue franšaise est une femme. Et cette femme est si belle, si fière, si modeste, si hardie, si touchante, si voluptueuse, si chaste, si noble, si familière, si folle, si sage, qu’ on l’ aime de toute son šme, et qu’ on n’ est jamais tenté de lui ětre infidèle.
The French language is a woman. And that woman is so beautiful, so proud, so modest, so bold, so touching, so voluptuous, so chaste, so noble, so familiar, so mad, so wise, that one loves her with all one’s soul, and is never tempted to be unfaithful to her.
Anatole France, 1844-1924
This quotation, widely known to speakers and lovers of French, is eminently but characteristically self-conscious and self-regarding.* The French have taken enthusiastically to the notion that their language has particular virtues, even—and this is curious for such an emotional and ethnocentric idea—that it is more rational than other languages. Perhaps more honestly than others set on global conquests, they came to assert that they were fulfilling a mission civilisatrice which went beyond the making of foreign profits for themselves, and foreign converts for their God.
The outcome, in terms of actual expansion of the language community of native and second-language speakers, what they call la francophonie,* has been modest, at least by the standards of its direct competitors (and neighbours): French can now count 77 million native speakers worldwide (two-thirds of them in France itself), and another 51 million second-language speakers.† This places it tenth in the list of language populations, effectively the smallest of the major European languages, and less populous even than German, which is hardly spoken at all outside its home continent.
French in Europe
French is by origin the species of Romance spoken in Gaul, which was broadly taken to be the realm of the Franks. Its modern name for itself, franšais [frásέ], comes from the Germanic adjective frankisk, through the Latinisation franciscus. For political and topographical reasons, it came to be typified and led by the dialect of the Ile-de-France region in the north-east. The Ile-de-France has many navigable rivers heading in different directions, hence is a natural crossroads. And so it was a place where speakers of many dialects met, and differences were levelled out. What is more, from the time of Clovis (late fifth century) it mostly had the royal court of the Franks somewhere within it. Different cities flourished and waned, but by the thirteenth century the city of Paris evidently enjoyed a particular cachet; a poet wrote:
Si m’ escuse de mon langage Excuse my language,
Rude, malostru et sauvage rude, ungainly and wild,
Car nés ne sui pas de Paris. for I am not a native of Paris.26
A milestone in the early history of