Cecily Strong delivers SNL's opening monologue in French last weekend. photo: screen grab. Last Friday, the world was shocked by a series of terrorist attacks in Paris that left at least 129 people dead, with many more wounded. Terrorists struck the Stade de France as a soccer match was playing out, as well as the well known Bataclan theater during a concert. France's president responded by immediately closing the country's borders and, over the weekend, launching a bombing campaign in Syria against targets associated with ISIS.
Immediately after the attack, people around the world began to show solidarity with the attacks. On Saturday, a day after the attacks took place, Facebook offered its users the option to change their profiles to the colors of the French flag. And Saturday Night Live, in lieu of its normal goofy opening gags, instead opted for an opening monologue by cast member Cecily Strong. Strong read a prepared statement, assuring Parisians that "Our love and support is with everyone there tonight." Then she repeated the statement, this time in a fairly convincing French. Americans are famously resistant to learning French, or anything that has to do with France. But last weekend they seemed to set all of that aside, in the name of remembrance for the victims, and perhaps, of hope for a more peaceful world. Canada's newly elected prime minister, Justin Trudeau. Photo: Alex Guibord, Flickr If there were a prize given out for the most famous person named Justin from Canada, it would have to go to Justin Bieber. But this week, another Justin has emerged who might steal that title, if only for a few days: Justin Trudeau, who earlier this week won Canada's election for prime minister.
Trudeau's victory has been attributed to many factors, including a generally liberalizing political climate in Canada, increasing skepticism about Canada's foreign interventions, more willingness to raise taxes in order to pay for social services, as well continuing ties between Trudeau's incumbent opponent Stephen Harper and scandal-ridden Toronto mayor Rob Ford. There may have been a few more unorthodox factors working in his favor too: his hair, his position on marijuana, and increasing fear among Canadians that the conservative Harper government has made it impossible to keep wearing those nifty Canada lapel pins they use to differentiate themselves from Americans abroad. But there was one other thing that helped Trudeau to his victory: his French skills. Canada is in a unique among countries in the Western Hemisphere. It's the only one where a significant portion of its territory is populated by speakers of a language other than the country's primary language - putting it in the same camp as countries like Belgium and Spain. This is a legacy dating from the Seven Year's War, fought in the 1700s, when formerly French Quebec became a British colony. Though Quebec would remain part of Canada even as it gained its independence from Britain in the 1900s, Quebec retained its distinctive identity, and a fierce pride in speaking French. As a result, Canada's government has taken pains to accommodate French speakers in the country. It has adopted a policy of nationwide "official bilingualism". And unlike the US, where presidential candidates who dare to learn French are ridiculed, speaking French is a critical skill for anyone in Canada who wants to throw their hat into the political ring. In fact, as part of the electoral process, candidates for prime minister are expected to take part in a debate held entirely in French. And during this election cycle, the results of the French debate gave Canada's political junkies plenty to pick over. Many concluded that Thomas Mulcair, whose party enjoys stronger support in Quebec than either Trudeau or Harper, went from being a secondary player to the center of attention, fielding more questions and spending more time defending his legacy than the top two. Not surprisingly, Mulcair actually outperforms Trudeau in the French-speaking department. The Montreal Gazette ranked his French as a 10 out of 10, noting that Mulcair is "at ease, he doesn't search for words, it's natural," when he speaks French. The other 10 out of 10 was Gilles Duceppe, leader of the Bloc Quebecois, a party with significant backing in Quebec and virtually no support anywhere else. Duceppe's party is so passionate about French that their website doesn't even appear in English. On the other hand, Trudeau's 8 out of 10 rank does edge out Harper, ranked at 7. While the Gazette notes that Trudeau isn't as natural while speaking French - "he thinks in English," the paper notes - they criticize Harper for being "much slower in French than in English." The paper points out another problem with Harper's French: he has been known to mispronounce "election" as "erection". Ultimately, in an election where candidates have to appeal to voters in Quebec while at the same time winning support in provinces like Alberta, which could easily pass as an Republican red state in the US, maybe an 8 out of 10 is the best score you could ask for. It's just enough French to show the Quebecois you understand them - in this case, literally. But it's not so much so as to inadvertently signal to the rest of the country, which still speaks mostly English, that you might forget about them. It's a delicate balance, that many of the world's linguistically polarized countries face. In others, such as Spain, things aren't going so well, and the country is threatening to split apart along language lines. Fortunately for Canadians, their political leadership relatively adept at holding things together. Facebook's Video Autoplay: Annoying, but a Possible Way to Bridge Cultures Across Languages?10/2/2015
Screen grab from "Dance Shadowstory", by Facebook user Hakim Fitdance.
Facebook's feature prompting videos to play automatically on user's news feeds once they pass them has been around for the better part of a year. And last month, the general consensus seemed to turn from apathy to outrage, as the autoplay feature ended up inadvertently broadcasting a clip of a gristly murder of a Virginia newscaster to millions of Facebook users. A Google search for "Facebook video autoplay" mostly reveals entries on how to turn the feature off, many of them dated from late August, right after the killing took place.
But since there are still sizable chunks of the global population who have not yet turned the feature off, it's having an unexpected effect: allowing videos to go viral regardless of their language. A couple days ago, I came across a video of an intricate dance routine that - I have to admit - caught my attention in part because of the autoplay. You can watch the video here:
But what really got my attention was the caption, which reads:
"Bonjour les copains, As you may of noticed, this isn't in English. It's in French. And since French is one of the languages I translate in, allow me to clear this up for you non-francophones: "Hello everyone, Hmm... Maybe in hindsight it's better that this text didn't appear in English, it's kind of tacky, though it just might sound profound if you're a sophomore in high school. But hey, maybe that's exactly why it went viral - people didn't focus on the text. Up until now, the main way videos spread across the internet is by being identified by text searches (identifying speech in audio is still a daunting task for computers). That means that if the text description for a video is written in, say, Swedish, it's only likely to go viral in places that speak Swedish. English may be the only exception; videos with descriptions in English are likely to go viral among non-native English speakers, since there are so many of them. But the same doesn't work in reverse; native English speakers don't generally find out about clips in foreign languages. In fact, a good number of native English speakers make a pretty good living just by mining foreign language viral clips and showing them to other native English speakers who wouldn't find out about them otherwise. I'm looking at you, John Oliver. But take a clip that is appealing visually, and automatically start it playing in front of people who wouldn't otherwise search for text in a foreign language, and you've got instant viral video potential. In the case of this video, it doesn't seem to have caught on yet with English speakers, but it's a hit among Spanish speakers and, oddly enough, people from Turkey, judging from the comments section: Now, I'm an optimist, and I also believe wholeheartedly in the benefits, and also the necessities, of bridging the language barriers that all too often encourage hostilities between people from different parts of the world. Sure, I find the Facebook video autoplay as annoying as anyone else does, but maybe by making videos from around the world go viral, it's doing us all a favor? I've been an occasional reader of This Is Africa, a news site with stories covering everything from Cairo to Cape Town, for a number of months. But, after clicking on one of their stories, I was surprised to find that a good chunk of the links on their sidebar are in French. Of course, this isn't too much of a surprise. After English, French is the most prevalent European language on the continent. Other European languages, left over from the troubled history of colonialism on the continent, have left their mark, such as Portuguese, Italian, and Dutch (there's also Afrikaans, a language with strong ties to Dutch spoken mainly in South Africa). In the northern part of the continent, Arabic is prevalent - another colonial language, though not a European one. And let's not forget about the rich linguistic diversity of Africa's home grown languages. A Wikipedia article asserts that there are anywhere from 1,250 to 2,100 languages spoken on the continent. Though some of those are the European ones listed above, most aren't. The site lists a number of other languages, such as Somali, Berber, Amharic, Oromo, Swahili, Hausa, Igbo, Fulani and Yoruba, as all having over 10 million speakers in Africa. Given this wide array of languages spoken, it's no surprise that a website aspiring to cover the entire continent would need to use more than one. But this presents a dilemma: what about the readers that don't speak French? Multilingual websites are a challenge, especially for news websites which are constantly updated. Many major news sites opt to center on a single language, with specific stories translated, especially if they are related to certain geographical regions in particular. For instance, a New York Times Magazine story about internet trolls in Russia was translated into Russian, even though most of the site's content is not. In the case of This is Africa perhaps posting articles in parallel languages isn't such a bad idea. And who knows? Maybe it will help some of its readers to brush up on their French skills. Last weekend was Catalonia's national holiday, and the fiercely independent Catalans wasted no time in taking the streets and demanding their independence from Spain. And in a few weeks, they might actually get it. England's The Prospect reports that on September 27, the region's parliamentary elections are "what amounts to a de facto referendum on independence, a second best to the Scotland-style plebiscite they were denied by Madrid last year."
In the meantime, the region's leader and perhaps the most outspoken advocate for Catalonian independence, Artur Mas (who some in Madrid refer to as "Arturo" just to annoy him), has seized on the forward momentum. He has harsh words for more Madrid-centric political figures, whether they be conservative PM Mariano Rajoy or even the charismatic leader of the country's leftist Podemos coalition, Pablo Iglesias. According to Spain's El Confidencial, Mas bashed a recent speech by Iglesias as an attempt at the "division of the Catalonian society". But what is it that makes Catalonia different from the rest of Spain (which includes, to be fair, a number of other regions vying for independence)? The answer often comes down to what gets referred to as a distinct culture that is incompatible with the rest of Spain. And perception owes in large part to the region's distinctive language: Catalan. As many of the world's culturally aware already know, Catalan is not Spanish, despite its similarities. But unlike another language that is not Spanish despite its similarities - Portuguese - Catalan's differences from Spanish don't branch off in an entirely different direction but instead lean toward words already found in another language spoken near Catalonia: French. When I visited Barcelona a number of years ago, I was aware of the fact that there, people speak Catalan, not Spanish. But I was expecting the differences to be minor, and not to have anything to do with any other language. When I got off the train, the first thing I saw was a sign directing me to the "sortida". I quickly inferred that this meant the exit, but what surprised me was how perfect a split of the difference the word was between the Spanish "salida" and French "sortie". So, which of the two languages is Catalan closer to? Some passionately argue that Catalan is in fact closer to French. In a language forum, one commenter from France who moved to Barcelona remarked that listening to people speak there was very similar to his own language. Another thread points out that the sentence "I want to eat eight apples" is remarkably similar between French ("je veux manger huit pommes") and Catalan ("vull menjar vuit pomes "). The Spanish version ("quiero comer ocho manzanas") is completely different. On the other hand, there are still plenty of vocabulary similarities between Catalan and Spanish. Take for instance the word for onion. It's "cebolla" in Spanish, "ceba" in Catalan, and "oignon" in French. Or a much more important one: beer. That's "cerveza" in Spanish, "cervesa" in Catalan, and "biere" in French. Perhaps one way of thinking of Catalan is not the halfway point between French and Spanish, but rather by a saying that a Catalan translator who identifies herself as Anna relates on her blog: "The worst of Spanish put together with the worst of French". But regardless of the linguistic hair-splitting that can go on endlessly between Catalan, Spanish, and French, one thing is certain. The existence of Catalan as a distinct language is a driving force in the region's push for independence. And it may prove decisive. An interesting comparison can be drawn with Scotland's push for independence. In Scotland, a region where people are much more likely to use English than Catalonians are to use Spanish, the independence vote failed. But now, Mas appears poised to win his vote later this month. It's a testament to just how inseparable the languages we speak are from our cultures, our friendships, and the very core of who we are as people. |
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