Nancy Huston, the Canadian-born novelist who moved to Paris during the 1970s, says that if one looks outside of France, the French language is not in decline.“The French literary establishment, which still thinks of itself as more important than it is, complains about the decline of its prestige but treats francophone literature as second class,” she said, while “laying claim to the likes of Kundera, Beckett and Ionesco, who were all born outside France. That is because, like Makine, they made the necessary declaration of love for France. But if the French bothered actually to read what came out of Martinique or North Africa, they would see that their language is in fact not suffering."
Read the complete article Pardon My French by Michael Kimmelman on the NYT which asks:
"What does French culture signify these days when there are some 200 million French speakers in the world but only 65 million are actually French?"
via www.nytimes.com
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