Global France, Global French: beyond the monolingual

Abstract

The article considers the theme of “Global France, Global French” in the frame of current debates on monolingualism and multilingualism. It explores questions of language use in contemporary France, and focuses on the linguaphobia evident in a number of contemporary ideological, political, social, and cultural contexts. The study suggests that the study of France and French in a global frame requires greater attention to questions of multilingualism and of the contact of the French language and francophone cultures with other linguistic zones. The phenomenon of the “translingual” or “exophonic” writer is presented as a key example of such shifts, and the article concludes with a study of the academician Francois Cheng, whose writing may be seen as a “translation zone” situated between French and Chinese cultures. The relationship between Cheng and the earlier twentieth-century author Victor Segalen reveals the extent to which the sociolinguistic situations evoked at the opening of the article cannot be li...