Macron Launches Drive to Boost French Language Around World

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The French president, Emmanuel Macron, is to spend hundreds of millions of euros boosting the French language worldwide, in a push to overtake English in Africa, increase the use of French online and teach French to more European officials to loosen the grip of the English language on Brussels, reported the Guardian. 

Macron hailed French as a "language of freedom" as he set out plans to pour funds into increasing French teaching and doubling the number of students in French schools abroad.

Macron said he wanted to boost French amid the widespread use of English in the EU. "The situation now is quite paradoxical. English has probably never been as present in Brussels at the time when we are talking about Brexit," he said. "This domination is not inevitable. It's up to us to set some rules, to be present, and make French the language with which one has access to a number of opportunities."

French was long dominant at EU headquarters in Brussels but English has become ubiquitous in European institutions, especially since eastern European members joined the bloc in 2004.

French is the sixth most spoken language in the world - after Mandarin Chinese, English, Hindi, Spanish and Arabic - and there are now more French speakers outside France than inside it. With population growth, there will be more than 700 million French-speakers by 2050, 80% of them in Africa. Macron wants to boost the number of people speaking French in the hope of leaping up the global language rankings.

But a cultural row had raged since Macron announced to students in Burkina Faso last year that French could within decades be "the number one language in Africa and maybe even the world" and that it fell to young Africans to defend it.

In recent months, Macron's...

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