The Francophonie and the Nederlandophonie?
For non-members. (note: these freebies will be rare.)
The best-sounding French to my ears is spoken by Africans and Eastern Europeans who wrestle with the language as one would wrestle a sheep to the ground. This is the French that I speak and struggle with, the rich, muddied French of the Francophonie. It’s emphatic and its speakers don’t eat all the syllables like the continentals do.
I think of it as “emergency French”: something one needs to conjure up to explain to a nurse why a child is crying or why a boiler might have stopped working. The vocabulary either finds itself or it doesn’t.
There are many native French speakers who expect the minimally educated to know their language, especially if they are western Europeans. And this expectation makes a world of difference. But even more important is this: even when foreigners meet this expectation, they will have to accept that they’re just one more speaker in the vast sea of the Francophonie.
The haute bourgeois who flee Paris during summer to meet their kind in the wealthiest corners of the Pays de la Loire will take note that the foreigner has performed as expected. They will conclude that the foreigner is minimally educated and likely from a good family or, at least, a family of strivers who are working towards respectability by, among other things, learning French.
Latin Americans of a certain social echelon know this by heart: to speak French and to vacation in Paris is to be educated and worldly. Anyone who aspires to respectability must have that selfie in the photo pile of the phone: the pretty face in the foreground, the tower in the background. Some of these foreigners might even try to go native on the expectation of marrying into French society. They would have better luck with a hipster, artsy family. But where does one find such people in gentrified, Mona-Lisa Paris?
As a second cousin who lives there put it to me: Look, you’re not going to find Cortázar walking around here, that city is dead, it’s gone. We might still love the place but Matisse, for the time being, is not coming back to Montmartre. There’s a shop full of souvenirs where he used to live. And the apartments upstairs are owned by absentee millionaires who can trace their lineage back to Napoleon’s marshals and the highest ranks of the Grande Armée. They have portraits of these people on the walls. France’s invisible but ever-present aristocracy, with its sprinkling of middling (and still hopeful) counts who’ve taken the trouble to unearth the papers scattered to the winds by the revolutionary rabble of the 18th century. (God bless that rabble.)
As Fernand Braudel might have put it, good luck getting rid of social structures and ways of thought that don’t want to be gotten rid of. But this unfair, because if there’s one country in the world that has done more to change the old ways of thinking, it is France. With apologies to all the worthy contenders and glorious revolutionaries on the list.
The indefatigable cousin has learned to economize and seek romantic efficiencies by casting a wider net. He must look to the European and African Francophonie and not waste another minute of his time trying to date above the station to which he has been assigned by Parisian society.
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The Dutch have different expectations of foreign visitors and the foreign-born. And I am not talking about Geert Wilders and the immigrant-bashing right-wingers. I don’t speak Dutch, but I’ve had the good fortune to witness the magic of this logical, seafarer’s language. The Dutch, like the French, also guard their gates, but utter the password in the national language and witness what happens.
I call it the “auntie and uncle” effect. Speak Dutch with the Dutch or the Flemish and you are part of the family. You’re under their wing. Why? The element of surprise might be one reason: they weren’t expecting you speak their language. There’s no Charles de Gaulle thumbing his nose at you in the back of their minds. (Well, this is also unfair. These days, Monsieur le Président just switches to English to spare you the trouble.)
When foreigners speak Dutch, they’re a welcome surprise to the nationals, whether they be Flemish or Dutch, and that makes them feel democratically welcome. As I once argued when in the company of Dutch speakers, there is such a thing as a “Dutch world” (remember Suriname, Namibia, the Dutch Caribbean and Afrikaans-speaking South Africa, where they also use those beautiful double-a words like Haarlem? And New Zealand, daughter of Old Zeeland?). A Dutch world indeed, as the old Dutch masters remind us. But don’t expect anyone in Delft or Gouda to draw up plans for the… Nederlandophonie. They would laugh at the idea.
Other people who laugh at the idea of the Nederlandophonie are expat parents who would never take their children out of a French-speaking school to place them in a Dutch-speaking one. Hey, we should respect people’s choices. But it’s sometimes helpful to point at the engines. I mean the economic engines without which half of northern Europe would sink into the North Sea. They speak Dutch, these engines.
Northern France? Pretty, very pretty, but notice all the boarded-up windows on Main Street. But hey, one can always head to Paris and join the cousin. Apply for a part-time position at the art shop or art cinema. Write pieces titled Looking for Paris in Paris and not finding it. With a typically Parisian-Hollywoodesque ending: I never found Paris, but the city found me! (Good lord….)
I will end this piece by saying that I always make it a point to pronounce the Spanish j in Gouda when I visit those pesky French-speaking cheesemongers who would rather say goo-da.
Non, monsieur, on dit (J-ouda), I tell them respectfully in my Macedonian plumber’s French. Pas Goo-da. One learns interesting things in life.
On my reading table
An excellent book that helps us think about thinking to read, write and live better. The section on “open minds” and “settled convictions” will give ammunition to anyone interested in mounting a much-needed attack not on our sane and practical anti-war realists but on the cloak-and-dagger thinkers who would have us believe that human beings will be at each other’s throats until the sun runs out of helium, purveyors of another invisible doctrine. The book: How to Think by Alan Jacobs. The book is more than a layman’s summary of Kahneman’s work, as the author would have us believe. It is full of interesting insights and stories.
Ezra Klein read Helena Rosenblatt. That’s good news for American liberals and American political discourse. A future guest on that show should be Christopher Clark, author of Revolutionary Spring. Trying to win elections and nothing but, the liberals in that book tiptoed around the fiefdoms of money for nearly a century. And look where that got us. We also meet characters who would have revolted and sung the Marseillaise if the 19th-century equivalent of Gavin Newsom had spoken admiringly of the 19th-century equivalent of Ronald Reagan.
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