Franglais row: Is the English language conquering France?

By Agnes Poirier


The French parliament is debating a new road map for French universities, which includes the proposal of allowing courses to be taught in English. For some, this amounts to a betrayal of the national language and, more specifically, of a particular way at looking at the world - for others it's just accepting the inevitable.


It all started with a faux-pas - to use a French phrase commonly borrowed by English-speakers.


On 20 March, when French higher education minister Genevieve Fioraso unveiled the proposed road map, she mentioned that there were only 3,000 Indian students in France.


In order to attract more foreign students, she added, French universities would have to start offering courses taught in English.


"We must teach in English or there will only remain in France a handful of experts discussing Proust around the table," she said.


But Proust was an unfortunate choice. The author is actually one of France's best literary exports and the reason why many students in the world take up French at university.



The influential Academie Francaise, the official authority on the French language founded in 1635, led a chorus of disapproval of Fioraso's proposals.


Few countries guard their linguistic heritage as jealously as France, and defend it so vigorously from foreign threats - such as the growing worldwide influence of English. Though, interestingly, the institution was originally founded by Cardinal Richelieu to fight off the invasion of Italian in the French language. Today, there are as many Italian as there are English originated words in the French language.


But Fioraso fought back, saying she only meant to be pragmatic.


Elite French business schools, and Grandes Ecoles such as the Institute of Political Studies also known as Sciences-Po, have been teaching in English for the last 15 years. Why, she asks, shouldn't other less prestigious universities follow suit?


According to the left-leaning daily newspaper Liberation, 790 higher education courses in France are already taught in English, and like Fioraso it sees nothing wrong with the idea.


Its all-English front page on Tuesday featured the words "Let's do it" in bold capital letters.


Liberation represents a growing fringe of the French population - young, urban, trendy, the kind which, in the last 20 years, has adopted franglais in their daily life.


For them, the work of the Academie Francaise - which offers grammatical advice and alternatives to new foreign words - now feels irrelevant and obsolete. They like nothing more than adding English sounding suffixes to French words, or combining English words into new terms such as "fooding" (made out of "food" and "feeling").


The result is a fantasy English that exists nowhere else; this, many think in France, is an inverted snobbery. "Why speak French well when you can speak English badly?" asks with irony the literary critic Bernard Pivot.



These people present themselves as pure pragmatists. English is conquering the world, they say, and it would be foolish to resist an inevitable evolution.


Once the language of the world's elite, French now ranks as only the eighth most-spoken language in the world and its influence is clearly receding. Even within Europe, if one takes a look at the European Union, there is no doubt that since the addition of 10 new member states in 2004 French has lost its appeal.


Once the lingua franca around the negotiating tables in Brussels and Strasbourg, French has given way to English. Though, if the UK were to leave the EU, there would be no reason for this to continue - English would remain the joint official language only of Malta, as well as widely-spoken in the Republic of Ireland (where Irish is the "national language") and Cyprus.


Those who oppose the introduction of English in French universities are attached not only to the national language, however, but more importantly, to the vision of the world it carries. A vision that differs from the English or American world view.


This is the crux of the matter, and, for a majority in France, the strongest argument in favour of rejecting the government's bill.


Teaching English is very different, they argue, from teaching in English. They support the teaching of foreign languages, and suggest starting it even earlier - in nursery schools - but they oppose the teaching of subjects such as mathematics, history and literature in any language but French.



Antoine Compagnon, a distinguished French scholar who taught at Columbia University and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science, maintained in a public letter that it would be better to teach foreign students French than tolerate "Globish" (the primitive English of non-English-speakers) and the dumbing down of teaching that would inevitably follow.


Foreign students who choose France over Britain, Compagnon says, are not only choosing the French lifestyle but also its culture and language. Teaching them Proust in English, in France, would be a travesty.


French MP Pouria Amirshahi, who represents French expats in North and West Africa, backed him up. "The signal given out to those everywhere who learn French abroad and in francophone countries throughout the world is not reassuring," told The Daily Telegraph.


It looks as though, in France, if you want to teach students in English, you have to do it quietly like the elite universities which never asked permission but never boasted about it either.

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What is Happiness?

Can you train yourself to get by on less sleep?

21 March 2013

Margaret Thatcher did it. So did Salvador Dali. They survived the day with only a few hours of sleep. The question is whether you can force yourself to do the same.

We waste a third of our lives sleeping – or that’s how some people see it. When there doesn’t seem to be enough hours in the day, you yearn to be like the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who was said to get by on just four hours sleep a night, or the artist Salvador Dali who wasted as little time as possible slumbering.

There is a quite a range in the number of hours we like to sleep. As Jim Horne writes in Sleepfaring, 80% of us manage between six and nine hours a night; the other 20% sleep more or less than this. But how easy is it to change your regular schedule? If you force yourself to get out of bed a couple of hours early every day will your body eventually become accustomed to it? Sadly not.

There is plenty of evidence that a lack of sleep has an adverse effect. We do not simply adjust to it – in the short-term it reduces our concentration, and if it’s extreme it makes us confused and distressed, and turns us into such poor drivers that it’s the equivalent of being drunk. The long-term effects are even more worrying. Repeatedly getting less sleep than you need over the course of decades is associated with an increased risk of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease.

But what about those people who do happily appear to manage on fewer hours than the rest of us?  Why does it not seem to make them ill? 

Firstly, you can console yourself with the fact that there are plenty of myths about people’s bold claims. Napoleon allegedly said that sleep was only for weaklings, but in fact he got plenty of shut-eye.

But there are a few very rare individuals who can manage with only five hours sleep a night without experiencing deleterious effects. They are sometimes known as the “sleepless elite”. In 2009, a team led by geneticist Ying-Hui Fu at the University of California San Francisco discovered a mother and daughter who went to bed very late, yet were up bright and early every morning. Even when they had the chance to have a lie-in at the weekend (a tell-tale sign that you are sleep-deprived) they didn’t take it. 

Tests revealed that both mother and daughter carried a mutation of a gene called hDEC2. When the researchers tweaked the same gene in mice and in flies, they found that they also began to sleep less – and when mice were deprived of sleep they didn’t seem to need as much sleep in order to catch up again. This demonstrates that genetics play at least some part in your need for sleep; unfortunately the sleepless elites’ enviable state of affairs isn’t available to rest of us, because at the moment we are stuck with the genes we have (that’s my excuse anyway).

But while it might not be possible to train yourself to sleep less, researchers working with the military have found that you can bank sleep beforehand if you plan well in advance. At the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research they had people go to bed a couple of hours earlier than usual every night for a week. When they were subsequently deprived of sleep they didn’t suffer as much as the people who hadn’t had the chance to bank sleep in advance.

This does involve a lot of effort, so in general what you need to do is work out your personal sleep requirement and then try to stick to it. In his book Counting Sheep Paul Martin describes a method of working this out. You probably need to do it while you’re on holiday because you need to wake up naturally, rather than rely on an alarm clock. Every night for two weeks you go to bed at the same time and see what time you wake up by yourself next morning.  For the first few nights you might well be catching up on missed sleep, but after that the time you wake up gives an indication of the length of your ideal night’s sleep.

You might be disappointed to find you need more sleep than you’d hoped, but don’t see it as a waste. This is time spent valuably allowing your body and mind to function at their best during waking hours.  It may use up a third of your life, but it makes the other two thirds so much better. The politician whose sleep patterns inspire me isn’t Margaret Thatcher, but Winston Churchill. He disliked getting out of bed so much that he stayed there working all morning, even receiving visitors in his bedroom. 

US federal prosecutors are preparing charges against the surviving Boston Marathon bomb suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as more details emerge of his capture.

If he is charged with using a weapon of mass destruction to kill people, he could face the death penalty.

Mr Tsarnaev is in hospital, unable to speak because of a wound to the throat.

US media quoted anonymous sources as saying he had been responding to questions in writing, but this has not been officially confirmed.

The FBI's Boston field office and the Boston police department both said the information did not come from them.

Boston's Mayor Tom Menino had earlier told ABC News that "we don't know if we'll ever be able to question the individual".

But the ABC, NBC and CBS networks all reported late on Sunday that the suspect was responding in writing to interrogation. This included questions about possible cell members and other explosives.

"We have a million questions and those questions need to be answered," said Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, quoted by Reuters news agency.

The suspect was captured on Friday evening after a huge manhunt during which Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's elder brother and suspected fellow bomber, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, died.

Police believe the 19-year-old Dzhokhar may have killed his brother himself, running him over in a car as he fled capture on Thursday night.

Monday's twin bomb attack on the Boston Marathon finish line killed a boy of eight and two women, and injured more than 180, of whom 13 lost limbs.

One policeman was killed and another injured during the manhunt.

Governor Patrick has asked Bostonians to observe a moment of silence for the victims at 14:50 local time (18:50 GMT).

A funeral service will also be held on Monday for one of the victims, 29-year-old restaurant worker Krystle Campbell.

No motive for the attack has been established. The brothers, who originate from Chechnya in southern Russia, had been living in the US for about a decade.

It is unclear when the charges will be filed against the suspect.

In addition to the federal charges, prosecutors for the state of Massachusetts, which does not have the death penalty, may file their own.

Mayor Menino said he hoped the federal prosecutor for Massachusetts, Carmen Ortiz, "takes him [Dzhokhar Tsarnaev] on the federal side and throws the book at him".

Interrogators are not reading Mr Tsarnaev his Miranda rights, which guarantee the right to remain silent and the right to a lawyer.

This exception is allowed on a limited basis when the public may be in immediate danger.

Boston police commissioner Ed Davis said on Sunday he believed the brothers had probably been planning further attacks.

The federal public defender's office in Massachusetts has agreed to represent Mr Tsarnaev once he is charged.

He is being treated in Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center for injuries he sustained before his capture, when he was found hiding in a boat in the backyard of a house in Watertown, a suburb of Boston.

Watertown's police chief, Ed Deveau, has said he believes Dzhokhar Tsarnaev mortally injured his brother just after their firefight with police.

It was initially reported that Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, had died of bullet and blast injuries.

Mr Deveau told the Boston Globe newspaper, however, that Dzhokhar had driven over him in a stolen SUV, dragging him on the pavement and apparently inflicting the injuries that killed him.

After Tamerlan shot at police and apparently ran out of bullets, the police chief said, officers tackled him.

They were trying to apply handcuffs when the SUV came roaring at them, with Dzhokhar at the wheel. The officers scattered and the SUV ran over Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Mr Deveau said.

Abandoning the car, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev fled the scene on foot, he said.

The same newspaper reports that Tamerlan Tsarnaev disrupted a mosque in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in January when he objected to the speaker comparing the Prophet Muhammad to civil rights champion Martin Luther King.

He reportedly told the speaker "You are a kafir [unbeliever]", and said he was contaminating people's minds and was a hypocrite.

Separately, US lawmakers on Sunday questioned why the FBI had failed to spot the danger from Tamerlan Tsarnaev after Russia had asked the US agency to question him two years ago.

The containment of drug problem

The speech of Antonio Mario Costa, the Executive director of the UN office of drugs and crime held at the session of the UN Commission on Narcotic drugs