Polyglottism in prison

POLYGLOTTISM EN PRISON

French and German tourists visiting Holland notice that their national languages aren’t a compulsory subject at Dutch schools any longer. Surprisingly, when speaking English, those tourists get an answer back immediately. Some of them, particularly those who stay at luxury hotels and buy Vuiton bags, suspect English to be the country's national language! When, however, listening to people chatting at a street café, they hear some incomprehensible gobbledegook that seems to amble along halfway between German and English. What is it? It’s Dutch or Frisian, one of the two national languages.

The four languages indeed belong to the same Germanic family but have evolved differently in the course of time. The result, today, is that the German, Dutch and British normally cannot understand one another. Now, the Dutch, who have no natural resources (except for wind and water), cannot be self-sufficient economically. They have, therefore, always depended on international trade to survive, to develop and to grow richer. They lost no time in understanding that speaking the language of their foreign customers and suppliers – English as it happens – gave them a strong lead over their competitors on the world market.

Similarly, Dutch scholars and scientists lost no time in understanding that publishing their theses and papers in English gave them an uppermost chance to be read on world level.

That's why Dutch children are taught English from their early school years onwards.

Unfortunately, the offspring of this educational system also encompasses the increasing number of people who, mastering their English fairly well, start steering the criminal course and get themselves involved in lucrative cross-border drugs-trafficking, especially as illegal drugs can be obtained easily in their home country.

You may wonder about my relationship, as a French citizen, with Dutch drug smugglers. Well, quite easy, since Dutch is my mother tongue, I've been appointed, with some thirty other expatriates in France, by the Social Rehabilitation Office in the Netherlands and by the Dutch Embassy in Paris to do voluntary work by visiting their nationals who get collared by French customs and eventually land in French prisons.

Without passing judgment on the grounds of their imprisonment, our task is to help them prepare their return to society and to prevent second offence. Meanwhile, they have to adapt to daily life in prison. But how to communicate with French inmates and warders if you don’t speak French? You need a common language, a so-called «lingua franca». For a Dutchman, the obvious choice is English. For a Frenchman, the obvious choice is… French!

Here, we come onto the key issue of my story: many French to date believe that learning a foreign language − mostly English − is useful, or just funny for a holiday trip. Many Dutch, on their side, believe English is essential at any time: study, culture, communication, foreign trade and so on. If you haven’t got any working knowledge of English, I was told, you’ll miss 75% of the total mass of information made available by Google.

That's where the shoe pinches: looking for a polyglot among the prison staff or population in France is like looking for a needle in a haystack. As a result, a Dutch prisoner in France who can’t speak French feels completely lost even if he speaks some English. Conversely, a French prisoner in the Netherlands who can’t speak Dutch is not the «ugly duckling»[u] as long as he can say a few words in English.

I won’t wish any of you to end up behind Dutch bars. Should it ill-advisedly happen, you’ll admit it really was a great idea to visit a Polyglot Café to improve your English!

Philippe-Henri

Hi Philippe-Henri, hi everyone,

Thank you very much for taking care of the French and worrying about their possible jail stay in the Netherlands.

True that the French don't think much of efficency.
It seems that Latin European countries thought of beauty and their well-being more than of money and business.

I'm very often lamenting the fact that my country-fellows don't care about learning foreign languages such as Americans, Brits and others.

Globalization, recent votes by our members of parliament iron out French specificities
Finally, we may be going to take up teaching English language at primary school... unless we'll wait for the Chinese wave.

Yes, there is obviously a characteristic difference in culture between Latin European and Germanic European peoples, in other words between southern and northern Europe.

I believe the split-up between the southern, «Burgundian» liking for art and aesthetics, epicureanism and untroubled existence on the one hand, and the northern, phlegmatic sense of money and business on the other, has it roots in Counter-Reformation, which occurred in the 16th century. The South, terrorized by the Spanish Inquisition and the French religion wars, remained catholic Those who had taken up the «new» religion introduced by guys like Luther and Calvin, fled to the North and invested their capital and craftsmanship in commercial, industrial and stock-exchange activities, especially hydraulic engineering, shipbuilding and overseas trade. The Calvinistic philosophy proved to be particularly popular because, unlike Luther, Calvin didn’t forbade his followers to make profits.

Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic French went on building churches and cultivating their own «esprit franco-français». They considered export markets to be just dumping grounds for their surpluses and refrained from learning foreign languages to make money abroad, as the Dutch and the English did. Today, there are still traces of this former xenophobia and lack of interest in foreign trade and languages. For a Frenchman, speaking a foreign language is a feat. For a Dutchman, there's nothing to be proud of.

I must say that the French education system currently makes a great deal of effort to promote language studies, from primary school onwards. It’ll take a generation before the situation changes. Meanwhile, there is still a flaw, deliberately kept alive by the authorities. They should stop promoting post-synchronization (instead of subtitling) of blockbusters and TV-broadcasted interviews of foreigners.

Philippe-Henri

Hi Philippe-Henri,

Thanks a lot for the good words above! I appreciate much.

However, hard to think everyone in England, Germany and the Netherlands came from France or Spain (or were reached by Calvin's or Luther's speeches)...
I'm kidding: your words are very interesting!

Can we look farther (distance from France/Spain/Italy):
- are Russians rather art or rather money? balanced?
- what about Scandinavians?
- what about the Scots, the Irish, the Welsh? are they (in the country not the ones living in London) good at making money or say are they keen on money?
- at the other side of the Mediterranean sea: my father often described Lebanese, Egyptians as very good at commerce, right?


I second you: Learning English at primary school in France will take long.

I remember a sentence I read about some native people, somewhere in Indonesia: they considered as "poor" the guys who visited them and didn't speak many languages as they did (there are thousands of dialects/languages there).

I approve you: Learning English at school with take ages.
You know many politicians of ours are very happy with Sarkozy's level, Raffarin's, Chirac's... they think France is a powerful country: they are paid for this but what's ridiculous, they believe it!

"Interviews of foreigners" is one thing, "post-synchronization" of films is another: culture variety should be kept and respected, the world would be boring with a single culture - the culture of MacDo, junk food, junk finance...
The French should make efforts but what languages to learn? First of all, why learn a language? culture? business? Chinese? Portuguese (Brazil)? Banbara? Wolof? Do you think English will be still used in a century (I know you can respond we have to live in 2013 first)?

Sorry to tease you with my words above

Better not to count on governments to vote new laws, right? It's also and mainly an individual issue.
We can find, more and more, in France, nowadays, parents who are looking for an English speaking nurse or nanny and they know what they want: native speakers, not French teachers.

... in progress.