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Notre langue est réputée pour sa clarté, pour la précision de son vocabulaire, pour la richesse de ses verbes et de leur construction, pour la force de sa syntaxe. C'est pour cela que toute l'Europe se l'est approprié il y a trois siècles. (Carrère d'Encausse, 2002).
[Our language is renowned for its clarity, for the precision of its lexis, for the range of its verbal structures and for the power of its syntax. These are the reasons why the whole of Europe adopted it three centuries ago].
This claim that French has special qualities is not unusual in the francophone world. When the secrétaire perpétuel of the Académie française, Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, reiterated it in these remarks at the institution's 2002 public meeting, it is unlikely that any of the audience would have queried her or would have been shocked by the assertion. French speakers will probably find it banal. If they search their memory they will realize they have heard it from various authorities. Perhaps they will remember the famous line from Rivarol's essay on the universality of the French language "Ce qui n'est pas clair n'est pas français" (Rivarol, 1783). Perhaps they will remember the words of Senghor, one of the founding fathers of the Francophone movement, who held French to be the language most fitted to be "la langue de culture de la civilisation universelle" (Senghor, 1961, p. 363). Perhaps they have just read contemporary scholars in the same vein, Colin arguing that French has "un statut et même un rôle à part" (Colin, 2005) or Druon, claiming that French is a "merveilleuse horlogerie de la pensée" particularly suited to discussion of human rights (Druon, 2005).
These claims seem to me to betray misapprehensions about language in general, and lingua francas in particular. The basic premise, that French possesses certain qualities of clarity, precision, and range, making it more appropriate for certain kinds of communication or thought processes than other languages, would be fiercely contested by many linguists, who would argue that all languages are equally complex and can develop to fit any use to which they are put (Bickerton, 1995; Chomsky, 1968, 1988; Steiner, 1975). But, supposing for the sake of argument that we accepted that French is actually a very...