03 December
Qu’esseuh-que ça veut direuh?
Will the French stop glottophobie?
By Richard Pooley
Does the British establishment discriminate against fellow citizens who don’t speak “proper” English? Certainly, in the past, it did. It was almost impossible to get to the top of any profession if one didn’t speak “Queen’s English” or “Oxford English”. Indeed my use of “one” there would have marked me out as someone who spoke it. The speaker’s accent – “Received Pronunciation”- was regarded by its speakers as standard English pronunciation from the late 19th century onwards. It was spoken by upper class and upper middle-class people who had attended private, fee-paying schools (anachronistically called public schools) across the country. Their accent is still called a “public school” one.
But whilst going to a fee-paying school unquestionably opens doors which are closed to the 93% of British people who did not, having a public school accent is no longer the key to getting a top job. Some in the UK argue that sounding posh can now stop you getting that job, especially if you are a white man.
Not so in France. The Paris-based establishment – national politicians, top officials and businesspeople, presenters and commentators working in the media, scientists and intellectuals – have long discriminated against those who don’t speak French with an accent like theirs. But last week the French National Assembly made such discrimination illegal by 98 votes to 3. The maximum punishment for what the French call glottophobie is 45,000€ and three years in prison. Will it work?
Imagine Jeremy Corbyn, when still leader of the UK Labour Party, in the middle of a media scrum outside his London house. A small, woman journalist, working for BBC Radio Merseyside, thrusts her microphone into his face and asks him in a thick Scouse accent if he is not being hypocritical in recent statements he has made about a couple of ongoing corruption investigations of rival politicians. What would have been the reaction if Corbyn had interrupted her question half-way through, told her she was talking nonsense, and asked her in a mock Liverpool accent: “What do you mean?” And then turned to the other reporters and asked if one of them was able to ask a question in “comprehensible English.” Corbyn would have been denounced as a racist and misogynist and would have been lucky to remain a Labour MP, let alone leader of the Labour Party.
But that is exactly how Corbyn’s equivalent in France behaved in 2018. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the Marxist leader of La France Insoumise, the far left party he founded in 2016, treated a female journalist from Toulouse with utter contempt when she tried to ask him a question in a thick south-western accent. Have a listen on this You Tube clip – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0BjLhXdVvU.
He mocked her accent when asking her what she meant: Qu’esseuh-que ça veut direuh?. He asked for any further questions from the reporters to be spoken in proper French.
Social media in France went into meltdown. It was a talking point in my village in south-west France for days afterwards. But whilst much of the talk was highly critical of Mélenchon, there were plenty who appeared to forgive or even back him. Not least his own constituents in Marseilles, whose accent is often as impenetrable to Parisians as a Glaswegian’s accent can be to Londoners. Mélenchon soon said he was sorry but then made his apology worthless by saying that he thought the journalist was mocking his accent (he came to France from Morocco when he was eleven and both his parents are of Spanish descent).
When Jean Castex became prime minister of France in July, Mélenchon joined many others in deriding his way of speaking, expressing irritation at Castex’s slow delivery. Castex’s predecessor, Édouard Philippe, said: “I leave you with Jean Castex. He has a strong accent, but he is very competent.” The magazine Paris Match described his accent as “gravelly” and “third-half [post-match] rugby” in style. A national broadcaster said his accent was like the one of “rugby commentators and weathermen.”
Castex comes from the Gers Department in south-west France, a Gascon who then became mayor of Prades, a large village in the eastern Pyrénées, some forty kilometres from the Spanish border. He speaks fluent Catalan. He went to the University of Toulouse, then to the prestigious Sciences Po in Paris and, finally, to the École nationale d’administration (ENA), la plus grande of France’s grandes écoles. Yet, unlike nearly all others who tread this golden path, he did not dispense with his accent.
Personally, I have grown to enjoy the gravelly yet sing-song, syllabic accent of the south-west of France. When we first arrived in our village, in the upper Dordogne valley, two hours drive north of Toulouse, even my English-French bilingual wife found it hard to understand our new neighbours. She learned her French while living in the Loire valley for three years. It is often said that the best French is spoken in the Touraine region and many French refuse to accept she is not French herself (though they instantly hear that her husband is anglais). I have learned to understand neighbour Hugues, a railwayman who travelled the country all his working life but who still lives just three hundred metres from where he was born. Every word ending in -in has a g added to it. It took me some time to realise he was talking about bread and wine when he said paing and ving. Mind you, the subjects we talk about are mostly limited to rugby, gardening and the unacceptable, in his eyes, behaviour of many in the village, some of whom he claims are his cousins. It’s in the third subject area that I still get lost. I nod and say d’accord when it looks as though agreement is required.
Derided even more than the south-western and south-eastern (Provençal) accents by the Parisian elite are the ch’ti accent of Picardy in the north and what is called the banlieue accent of the poorer, immigrant-occupied outskirts of the large cities, especially Paris itself. The hugely popular 2008 film, Bienvenue Chez Les Ch’Tis, makes play with the inability of outsiders to understand the Picard accent. Imagine naming a restaurant in the Cotswolds Welcome to the Land of the Chavs. That is what happened in my French village, 500 kilometres south of Picardy. The owner of a bar/restaurant named it after the film, presumably as an unsubtle “up yours” to the many Parisians who holiday in the village at Easter and in the summer. Perhaps that’s why it only seems to be patronised by locals.
To begin to understand why the French elite across the political spectrum have up to now openly discriminated against those who don’t speak like them, you have to know something of the history of education in France. One of the biggest problems faced by the leaders of the French Revolution in the 1790s was the fact that many of the French did not speak French. Much of the 19th century was spent by France’s rulers suppressing regional languages such as Occitan, the dialect spoken by the ancestors of my neighbour Hugues. In the 1880s speaking and learning any language other than the French of the Paris bourgeoisie was banned in primary schools. Teachers were ordered to “correct the mistakes in pronunciation coming from the local accent.” To make sure this happened teachers were allocated to schools far from their own birthplace. This was government policy long into the last century. All the younger teachers in the secondary school in Chinon where my wife taught in the late 1970s had come from other parts of France. The First World War accelerated the process of turning the French into a people who spoke just one language with an accent that all could understand. It was a matter of life and death that officers and men could communicate effectively with each other. It is a matter of great pride now that all French can understand each other. They were all taught the same language at school.
The French love their language with an intensity which English-speakers find hard to fathom. And the way you speak it matters. It shows you are educated. I spoke Spanish fluently as a nine-year old after spending three years in Venezuela. I have forgotten most of it since then. But whenever in a Spanish-speaking country, my stumbling efforts to speak Spanish are appreciated. More importantly, I can sometimes make myself understood. The Spanish and Italian businesspeople who I taught English in my youth found English grammar and pronunciation a nightmare but could still manage to communicate. “Only Connect!” was their aim. Not so many of the French (and Germans and Japanese) I taught. They wanted to speak the “correct English” spoken by “educated people” (this usually excluded all Americans) and hated not being able to do so.
I struggle to improve my French mostly because I don’t have what my wife calls, annoyingly but correctly, “a good ear.” I can’t get the pronunciation of standard metropolitan French right. So, my French neighbours find it very hard to understand me even though they themselves have a strong south-western accent.
For over two hundred years ambitious young French people from the provinces have learned to become linguistic chameleons, able to change their idiom and accent to suit the occasion. The two National Assembly deputies who successfully pushed through the new accent discrimination law are examples of this. Laetitia Avia has admitted that she “corrected” her banlieue accent when she attended Sciences Po and then became a lawyer. Christophe Euzet is from Perpignan, close to the Spanish border, and represents the people of Sète, 100 kilometres north along the Mediterranean coast. People like him “have to give up part of their identity if they want to advance their careers.”
Will the new law mean their successors will no longer have to scrub out their regional accent to get on in the world? I doubt it. The French establishment may be more careful in what they say about people’s accents. But they will still judge people by how they speak.
