Points of view - language in perspective

It only takes a few days of sunshine for you to get used to it and to expect that sunshine is the norm. Which is rather a silly thing to do in Galicia, which can sometimes be as wet as Manchester. Be that as it may, even though the locals keep saying that summer has never really got going this year, we’ve had some fine, sunny days. And a maximum temperature of 26 or 27 degrees is fine by me. The quality of the light on these sunny days has been amazing. Everything stands out with clearly defined edges, like pictures seen through a 3D viewer.

Today by contrast is grey and cloudy, although still rather warm and sticky as if there might be a storm brewing, and everything looks oddly flat. Even the sea looks flat, which is perhaps an odd thing to say, but it looks like a badly painted bit of stage scenery, executed by someone with no sense of perspective.

Okay! That’s enough of the waxing lyrical stuff.

I read yesterday that the French are getting cross about the use of English all over the place. “Franck Riester, Emmanuel Macron’s minister of culture, has this week announced his intention to enforce, or strengthen, on digital platforms the decades-old Toubon law, which compels advertisers to make sure they say things in French. Something they really haven’t been doing. From Air France telling flyers that “France is in the air” to the 2024 Paris Olympics commission promising sports fans the world over that the games are “Made for Sharing”, advertising in French is increasingly overrun with global online English, the flattened lingo of social media and the media that follow it.”

You only to look at advertising hoardings, and shop signs for that matter, here in Spain to see how ubiquitous English has become. Often it’s used in weird and wonderful ways that English speakers would never even recognise, all in an attempt to give an air of sophistication to the name of a place, like “Bestdrive”, the car repair shop near our flat. And I think that’s what niggling the French. Theirs used to be the go-to language if you wanted to achieve that sophisticated air or a touch of magic and mystery. A little ooh-la-la! And now they are feeling miffed that the advertising world has restyled itself - indeed, has been “relooké” as the French might say in twisted franglais - to give English pride of place.

Their national pride and feeling of superiority has been dented.

Besides, it’s an argument that has been going on for decades. I read this: “Of course, every time a government talks about the purity of the language, hackles are raised. For kids in the 1990s, being told to call their Walkman a baladeur just felt daft. It was a Walkman, it said so right there on the plastic lid.” And I was reminded of something from even earlier. Back in the 1970s I was at a standardising meeting for marking spoken examinations for what eventually became GCSE French. The chief examiner instructed us that we could not accept 16 year olds saying, “J’aime le rollerskating”. That should be marked as wrong! They were supposed to say “patiner à roulettes”. A Frenchwoman, native speaker, stood up and protested. Her own children, she declared, used “le rollerskating”, not because they lived in England but because that was what their Parisian cousins said.

You can’t legislate for language, much as you might like to.

I sat and listened to French being spoken in the Castro cafe the other day when I was people-watching. In the summertime you get quite a lot of French-Galicians (ie Galicians who went off a generation or so back seeking work in France and stayed there) returning to visit family. This was one such example: two women, one speaking only French, the other clearly speaking both French and Spanish, and a bunch of children who switched between languages easily and impressively.

One thing that struck me as I listened to the French-only-speaking woman was that even when she spoke with a smile, she still sounded rather as if she was sneering.

Another sort of national superiority! Not that I am a believer in racial stereotypes!