Les Parapluies de Cherbourg

This past Monday night, I watched a film call Les Parapluies de Cherbourg at Cafe Istanbul. This film was presented by the Ciné Club of the Alliance Française de la Nouvelle-Orléans. It was fun and the host directed a conversation about the film afterward. He started with something like, “Any questions, thoughts, commentaires?” Commentaires. This was almost the only word of French that he and the attendants used. “It’s weird,” I thought, “Is it always like this? With the discussion in English?” Fortunately, I brought my friend who sometimes attends a Ciné Club in Spanish. I asked her if they do the same thing after the films, if they talk about them in English. She told me no, everything is in Spanish.

It seems to me that this is a commun thing in Louisiana when it comes to French. It’s nice to thing about a state where we can speak French every, but the idea is nicer than the realization of the idea. One can see this in the Facebook Group Cajun French Virtual Table Française. As of today, this group has 6,591 members and grows every day. It’s the perfect forum for one to get accustomed to using French daily, but this doesn’t happen too much. Usually, even the members that speak and write it fluently decide to post in English. It’s a shame, and I can’t stop myself from thinking that a lot of them simply like the idea of French, that French exists in their minds as nothing more than a romantic apparition.

But it’s hard to learn a language, and really easy to speak in a language that one knows that everyone will understand. Yet even people who are in a region where French is common often choose English. Last summer, I was in an immersion program in Liege in Belgium. I won a scholarship from CODOFIL in order to afford it. I wasn’t alone, there were other people from Louisiana that had done the same. We stayed in a hotel outside of the university where we were taking classes. Every day, we’d spend the morning speaking French in at the university and every day nearly everyone would start speaking English again immediately after class, at the hotel. It wasn’t that they couldn’t speak it, nor that there wasn’t a good reason to speak it, but no one finished the program without using English.

This is a problem for the maintenance of French in Louisiana. It’s necessary that the language be more than an idea, more than just a skill that one can use while on vacation in France. One must decide that the language is living, that if one uses it every day, everywhere, the people around them will decide that they should learn to use it, too.