“Nearly half a billion people living in 55 countries and territories belong to the French-speaking world”, France’s Ambassador to Ukraine Pascal Fieschie declared, speaking at the opening of the French Language Week in Ukraine which was held in the Palace of Cinema in Kyiv.
Simultaneously, days of France which gave the world such slogans as “Liberty, Equality Fraternity” are being marked in all the countries where French embassies are located. French Embassy Counselor FranНois Delahousse told The Day that France has 200 diplomatic offices worldwide, which is second in number only to the United States.
The Day’s correspondent failed to find out the damage done by these festivities to the French treasury. French Embassy representatives said that member countries of the Association of French-speaking Countries were active in organizing the Francophony Week. In Kyiv, in particular, the focus was made on cultural program, with the Kyivans watching French films and students of universities and schools competing in French language contests. The residents of Rivne must have been galvanized by the French cuisine, as a real French coffee-shop opened in this West Ukrainian city last week.
Francophony as a movement dates back to the early 1960s. Its main initiators were the countries of Africa, not France, French Embassy press attachО for culture, Antoine Arjakovsky, stressed. As a result, the Association of French- speaking Countries emerged in 1970. At present, some 200 million people speak the language of Balzak.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, francophony got its second chance, gradually winning over from the Russian language. In the early 1990s Moldova switched over from the Russian alphabet to the Latin one bringing its essentially Romanian language still closer to French. The Moldovans can now study their own language, not Russian as before.
Last year Bulgaria joined the Association of the French-speaking countries. Lilija Topalova, her country’s representative in the Association, told our correspondent that Bulgarians study French as a first foreign language, with French magnet schools students over 14 years of age taking all their courses only in French.
As Mr. Arjakovsky noted, Ukraine also wants to join the French-speaking world and submitted its application for membership in the association. At present, nearly half a million of Ukrainian children have daily classes in French. French, NATO’s second official language after English, is also studied by Ukrainian servicemen, Mr. Delahousse pointed out.
Obviously, French is unlikely to regain the popularity it enjoyed from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Its present growing role could be explained by the fact that as an instrument of communication the French language does not impose any limitations on the cultural values of the French speaking countries, especially considering that many of them have two or three official languages.
The love France has for its language should become an example for Ukraine to follow. The Ukrainians, like the French, should also hold weeks of their sonorous language in neighboring countries and the countries where the Ukrainian Diaspora lives.
