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Former All Black Byron Kelleher has found a new home in Toulouse, and after three years here, he’s become one of the key players for Stade Toulousain, and a crowd favourite. He’s also learnt to speak French…

As another anglophone in France who still struggles sometimes with the language, I don’t want to seem like I’m mocking him: learning a new language as an adult is not easy. But Byron’s mixture of Otago English and the accent de Toulouse is, er, original…

He says he wants to stay in France after he retires from the game, and I wish him very well – there are much worse places in the world to settle down than the southwest of France.

When I planned my move to France, I partially imagined that I’d have French friends, and that we’d speak in French all the time: erudite conversations about new-wave cinema in late-night cafés and jokes about Sarkozy amidst Gauloise smoke. The reality so far has actually been more interesting, and introduced the dilemmas of being a “foreigner” in a strange land.

Thursday night tango at Place Saint-Anne, Montpellier

So far, all my friends in France speak English. Which is not to say we all speak English together often. But it is something we all have in common. My friends fall into three broad categories:

• British and American expats (they are unavoidable, and the ones I’ve met aren’t annoying)
• French citizens who are bilingual from birth (ie. they had an anglophone parent)
• French citizens who learnt English as a second language and may have spent time in anglophone countries

Conversations with all these people often take place in French, but sometimes we switch between English and French mid-stream, depending on the subject matter and whether we think one or the other language can express an idea (or tell a joke) better.

Context plays a role: for instance, it’s ridiculous to speak to my American or British friends in French, but if a francophone friend walks into the room, we’ll switch to French so we don’t seem like we’re rudely talking in a foreign language behind their back.

Abandoned shopfront, Montpellier

I’m coming to the conclusion that my relationships in this country will always pivot around the unavoidable fact that I am a foreigner, and an anglo-saxon to boot. Perhaps this is why my friends here all speak English – at some level they all relate to the challenge of sitting inside and outside a culture at the same time.

The nature of being a foreigner does not make friendships less genuine or more distant here. It’s just a question of becoming comfortable with your role as an intermediary between two languages and cultures. Given my accent and life experience, it’s impossible to be accepted as a French person, so it’s not worth trying. But in the end, I didn’t move to France to become French.

Maybe life in France is a bit like finding oneself in an ocean – swimming in French but breathing in English. Both languages are necessary to make progress and to stay afloat.

The mouth of the Hérault river at Grau d’Agde

Today I set out to write an intelligent and interesting post for the blog, but then saw this video (via Miss Expatria), and realised that anything I wrote could never compete with Capucine and her “popotamus that is allergic to magic”.

Not only is the story charming, but I’m simply jealous of the way someone her age gracefully dances through the pluperfect reflexive verbs (“ils s’étaient perdus”) and the literary narrative past tense (“il décida”). These are aspects of grammar I struggled with well into university years.  Oh, to be a native speaker!

Once you’ve reached a certain level in speaking a foreign language, new words become your enemy. What you must keep learning however is context, and clichés. It seem that further success becomes  a matter of choosing which new things to retain, while letting other things slide back into opacity.

For example, when I’ve been on walks in the countryside around Montpellier, people have taught me a whole lot of new words for flowers, plants and insects I’d never seen before. I forget the words immediately: partly because my interest in botany and entymology is fleeting, but also because these are not words I can use in a daily context, except when I’m out wandering in the garrigue with French-speaking friends.

(By the way, la garrigue itself is a useful word to know in Languedoc – it’s the name used to describe the local countryside outside the towns – calcified rocks, dry hills and low shrubby “forests”. It’s a nice word that can be compared to the use of  la plaine and les vallées in Alsace as conversational shorthand to designate the two main geographical zones of the region: the Rhine river plain and the valleys of the Vosges.)

New vocabulary is just treachorous. Often my brain freezes up when it tries to put together disparate French words into intelligent sentences. My favourite stumbling block word is réaménagement (improvements/renovations): the open-vowelled articulation between the “ré” and the “a” trips me up every time. But if the words can be fitted into a cliché that I’ve consciously or unconsciously learnt, the language flow more freely.

My observation is that native speakers talk in a limited number of idiomatic clichés – verbal shortcuts  and combinations of words that convey particular meaning. I read somewhere that the average English speaker’s daily functional vocabulary is around 1000 words (I can’t find the reference), and it’s probably similar in French. So with a few thousand words and a few hundred contextual phrases in French, you can work your way around most situations.

As an anglo-saxon, it’s important to come to an acceptance that your French will always be peppered with unintentional anglicisms, (as Goscinny so brilliantly lampooned in Astérix chez les Bretons) and I know that my accent will never disappear. But occasionally French phraseology erupts in a conversation with such astounding beauty that you know you’ll remember and use it yourself. Take this recent example:

Les casques de ski se sont démocratisées ces dernières années.

This was uttered by my friend who was commenting that everyone these days wears ski helmets. The belle tournure of the phrase and his choice of active verb was (to me) striking. The use of the reflexive se démocratiser avoids the cardinal French sin of using the passive voice, and verb itself appeals – literally he said “Ski helmets have democratised themselves in recent years“.  To anglophone ears at least, the idea that an article of clothing can undertake a political act is a pretty original thought.

And so “Se démocratiser” (and the slightly more workaday “se banaliser”) have entered this speaker’s verbal armoury for good.

I’m learning new words, but new vocabulary is no longer really the challenge. The real game now involves further mastering the frameworks that make my words easily comprehensible to francophones: finding neat ways to construct questions or provide generalised responses for situations.  Sometimes, it works like magic, but sometimes, hidden booby traps still appear.  Il faut faire toujours attention.

In France it’s long been acceptable to take advantage of “le weekend” to undertake “un relooking” (either house renovation or a  fashion makeover, depending on context).

I’m in no position to complain about any French person who chooses to borrow English words whenever it suits them. After a few weeks back in France, I’m still just getting to grips again with the passé composé of reflexive verbs and abusing the subjonctif at every opportunity.

But it seems to be in business that the vocabulary of le management anglo-saxon has gained particular prominence. I’ve started keeping a list of business Franglais. Here are a few I heard this week:

• le pipe-line = sales pipeline (Jean-Marc, t’as combien de prospects dans ton pipe-line ce mois-ci?)
• le boss = the person who asked Jean-Marc the probing question above
• un brainstorming = brainstorming (an opportunity for a frank and passionate exchange of opinions on why Jean-Marc doesn’t have enough sales dans son pipe-line)
• le team marketing = the people who ultimately get blamed for the lack of sales in Jean-Marc’s pipe-line
• un slide = a Powerpoint slide. Possibly produced for le boss by somebody in le team marketing
• un Powerpoint = une collection de slides. Presentation of “un powerpoint” also provides an opportunity for a frank and passionate exchange of opinions.
• le goodwill = goodwill (ie. the value of a business entity not directly attributable to its assets and liabilities)
• le staff = employees (some of whom were on strike last week)
• le Performance Management = techniques for finding ways to help le staff work more effectively
• le Balanced Score-Card = a tool used in “le perfomance management” focusing not only on financial outcomes but also on operational, marketing and developmental/environmental measurements
• les stakeholders = that’s stakeholders, as distinct the members of le staff who order filet mignon (à point) at the company restaurant
• un lunch = the partaking of food with business colleagues in the middle of the day. Another opportunity for a frank and passionate exchange of opinions (generally about non-work topics).
• le business model = apparently any model of business in France that permits flagrant use of English words in day-to-day operations

So I’m still picking up pieces of my former French fluency.  I’m ashamed of the verbal disaster area I’m creating as a long-dormant part of my brain creaks back into action, rashly gluing together semi-forgotten words with half-remembered grammatical structures.

But it is a relief to know that when I do forget a word, I can insert an English one instead, and sometimes find out that it’s just as acceptable as any French alternative.

Bon courage à tous !