Quote:
Originally Posted by wwmiv
Yeah… those numbers are BS and the projections are detached from reality.
Currently (L1+L2)
Spanish: ~580-600 million
French: ~300-320 million
There are so many geopolitical events that will intervene between now and when it is even plausible that French could overtake Spanish (2100 maybe?) that it isn’t even worth discussing.
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323.4 million for French, and that's only in the Francophone countries (so not counting the French speakers in the USA for instance, when that 600 million figure for Spanish speakers includes the Spanish speakers in the USA). As a reminder, a like for like comparison (including all countries) is 396 million for French and slightly more than 600 million for Spanish (as per the 6th edition Francophonie report).
And this 323.4 million is only for the people already in school (or who went to school), i.e. it doesn't included the children under the ages of 6-9 y/o (depending on countries) who haven't started their French-language education yet. In Africa, where most Francophones live, these children are very numerous, and they will start their French-language education in the coming 5 years. Then the next generation born will be even bigger than the current one. It's a snowball effect.
Spanish has no reserve. Younger generations are smaller and smaller.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wwmiv
Let’s take a few “remote” possibilities:
• Russian and Islamist financed proxy wars destabilizes the West African interior region further, Russia and Islamist backed militants somehow ends up victorious, and French falls out of political favor and education pivots to a local language—this is ongoing in Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and will likely expand. In Senegal, this could mean political consolidation toward Wolof, for instance.
• A huge swath of the Democratic Republic of the Congo is conquered by Rwanda (functionally ongoing) and, in the eventual federal consolidation with the East African Union as part of Rwanda, Swahili and English could displace French. Guess what? That’s what happened in Rwanda in 2008.
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These scenarios typically fail to take into account how entrenched is the French language in the Francophone sub-Saharan African countries. The Sahel countries already tried to pivot away from the French language in the 1970s, at the peak of Soviet anti-Western influence, when French was less widespread in those countries than today, and they failed. And they are currently failing for the same reasons: no single language to unify those countries other than French, no money to transform the education system into using the local languages instead of French (printing books, training teachers, etc), no desire by the local population to receive an education in the local languages (because that affords less mobility and opportunity to the children). Today, with mass Francophone medias reaching all corners of Africa, it's even harder than in the 1970s when cell phones didn't exist, TV was virtually non-existent in these countries, and at best people only had a small radio set.
As for the DRC, well it WAS conquered by Rwanda, in 1997, and contrary to what some people in Britain and America anticipated with excitement, it didn't lead to the eradication of the French language there. Quite the contrary, the Anglophone leader of the Rwanda-backed rebellion turned into a Francophone president (out of necessity, because that's the language spoken by most people), and French has never been so spoken in the DRC than now (certainly more than in 1997).
A new Rwanda-backed rebellion today would be even less unlikely to change the national language of the DRC than in 1997. It's simply not realistic as a scenario.
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