English is increasingly common in Grenoble, not least in graffiti !

I used to wonder why, very often, when I tried to speak French in a restaurant, shop, post office or market, for example, the reply would come back to me in English. Given that I am at least semi-competent in French, I couldn’t help feel offended at being treated as a tourist in the country I called home. I don’t think it would be presumptuous to say that I am not alone in this experience. When I first arrived in Grenoble I made a school-boyish but pardonable error in asking: Est-ce que vous avez du bière? at a café, having not quite nailed down the gender of that favourite English beverage. The waitress looked at me as if I was from out of space, before replying “Not bière”.

However, what has become increasingly apparent to me is that my linguistic skills are not being spontaneously judged and deemed unfit but rather that the French are grabbing an opportunity to practice their English. The look of the woman in the café was probably not one of complete incomprehension but one masking certain grammatical computations, for what it was worth. It is probably a look I wear myself quite often as my brain lags doggedly behind my tongue during an experiment with, say, the French Subjonctif.

On the bus yesterday I was very amused to hear a group of nine or ten primary school children singing in unison, “I like English! I like English!” before a musical rendition of the alphabet that faultered every time they negotiated the obstacle course that is “L-M-N-O-P”. “Yes, it is! No, it isn’t!”, I left them chanting ecstatically, presumably in recollection of their English classes, quietly wishing to myself that I had adult students with such unbridled enthusiasm about their training.

This morning I was delighted to be greeted at the boulangerie by a welcome new face. As I have mentioned in a previous post about Grenoble’s service culture, trips to my local shops have sometimes been fraught with peur et tremblement. Today, however, I was greeted by something extraordinary, a new face whose defining characteristic was a smile from ear to ear. Surveying the empty shelves I asked, “Vous n’avez plus de croissants?“, to which the smiling face replied, amiably and in no poor accent, “Not any more!”. In such situations I prefer to persevere in French while remaining friendly enough to show that I don’t mind a conversation in two languages. As he handed me my change with the kind of extraordinary deference reserved for a foreign dignitary (a half bow, and a “thank you, goodbye”), I didn’t even care that I had no viennoiseries to bring back to my wife on Mother’s Day.

Such exchanges are not always as pleasant, I had an interesting experience at the market in Aiguinards a few weeks back. I was at the fromagerie when a man struck up conversation with me, at first curious about my five week old daughter in a baby carrier: generally a guaranteed way to attract attention in France, for better or worse. Realising I was British, he then used the occasion to practise his English, even though I persevered in French. He told me he had spent time studying in the UK, before complaining about the “Shitty weather”. He went on to add that the “food was really Shitty in England, absolutely disgusting! The food was so Shitty it was the first time in my life that I lost weight. There’s probably more cheese here [gesturing at admittedly fantastic selection on the market stall] than in the whole of Britain”. “I don’t mean to offend you”, he added. Charming!

So, despite the best efforts of the Académie française, English seems to be permeating French culture. At my school the other day I had to evaluate the level in English of a number of employees sent by their company. For many of these, it was their first job and they had just recently completed their studies. Furthermore many had taken the opportunity to live and work in the UK to learn English. The impression I am getting is that while the French are proactively and pragmatically studying English, the Brits have become lazy and complacent about studying languages since English became so internationalised.

Tant pis!, the Brits might say (if they knew how to), except that, as reported in the Guardian, companies in the UK are increasingly turning to foreign nationals for jobs that require more than one language. The article shows how second language study has declined in Britain since the Labour government stopped making it obligatory at GCSE, a serious error in the view of many, myself included. I remember one frustrated colleague when I worked in London reacting to a telephone conversation in stilted English with a counterpart from a French museum with the angry exclamation, “I hate it when people can’t speak English!”. Perhaps the wind of change has already come.

Related Posts:

• Banking in English with a personal touch
• abc anglais – new English speaking playgroup in Grenoble
• One Monday at Montessori International
• One Monday at Montessori International (part III)
• One Monday at Montessori International (part II)