GREECE — a country where only 13 per cent of school children choose French as their first foreign language — will today [26/11/04] be accepted as the 57th member of the Organisation of French Speaking Nations. The Greek Foreign Ministry said that it would join La Francophonie at the organisation's two-day summit in Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso to support the battle against the spread of English. Although Greece could hardly claim to be a fully fledged French-speaking country, its application will be welcomed by President Chirac of France, who is in Ouagadougou for the meeting. It will, by no means, be the only non-francophone member of what is, theoretically, a francophone association.
Set up ten years ago, after France had tried and failed to bind its former colonies into a form of French commonwealth, the International Francophonie Organisation includes a disparate array of countries. Albania, Bulgaria, Poland, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldavia, Romania, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Egypt are among them. The official objectives of the organisation are to use "the links created by sharing the French language" to promote "peace, cooperation, and development". The promotion of democracy and "dialogue between civilisations" are also goals for La Francophonie. However, in practice, the organisation's main concern is to stop English from becoming more dominant than it already is — and to preserve a space for other languages. Many member states see La Francophonie as a lever to promote their own language, rather than French.
A current of anti-Americanism also runs powerfully through the organisation. Paris sees it as a body that will help M Chirac in his campaign for a multipolar world in which Europe acts as a counterweight to the US. Giorgos Koumoutsakos, the Greek foreign ministry spokesman, said yesterday that his Government "believes in multilingualism". He added: "We want to join this organization because we don't want a monopoly by a single language but to have many languages. "We need to express ourselves in many languages. Anything that can be done to avoid the move towards single language is worth doing." In the sixth form, a vast majority of Greek pupils drop French. At this level, 91.2 per cent study only English. |