It was mid-June when the summer heat that had already settled over Paris hadn’t yet reached Normandy, when my coworker invited me to his house to celebrate his birthday. It wasn’t a big event (altogether we weren’t more than nine or ten that had gathered at this house in a small town on the English Channel) but we were big enough that for most of the night, we spent it in smaller groups. Gossiping over the upcoming legislative elections, judging the quality of the wines our host had chosen. Talking about school. About students, about my students.
It wasn’t long before the conversation shifted to one of my kids, who I’ll refer to as Student. My school was rather unique from a linguistic perspective; in addition to the primary teachers, I was one of four English instructors from the United States. My coworkers, being well acquainted with our school’s constantly rotating roster of American instructors and the difficulties of teaching monolingual French students, supported me linguistically; despite their limited English and my error-ridden French, we developed strong relationships.
One coworker spoke up, saying, “I just don’t think it’s fair. All of Student’s classmates try so hard to speak in English, but you never see Student even saying ‘Bonjour’ to their teacher or ‘Merci’ to the lunch ladies.” Student came to my school a few months after I started, having just moved to France from the Middle East with their family. They spoke English fluently, leagues better than their classmates could, and they arrived at our school with zero knowledge of French.
Yet, this notion of fairness stood out to me. In linguistically diverse settings in which there is a clear distinction between the majority and minority languages, we can expect there to be some degree of sociolinguistic asymmetry. For instance, on a school playground in rural Kentucky, the ability to speak English determines the extent to which children can connect with one another. Even if a Spanish-speaking child gets to play with their classmates, there will always be a barrier to true, intimate connection so long as the language barrier exists. Even as a French-speaking adult, I could tell that my limited proficiency impeded my ability to develop meaningful relationships with my students for the first few months until my French got stronger. Even though Student’s classmates tried so hard to create a welcoming and supportive environment with their limited English skills, it was clear that Student couldn’t connect with the other kids as well as the French-speaking students could. In the courtyard, as the kids created their own games and negotiated their rules, it was clear that some students would quickly lose their patience and desire to play with Student when they struggled to keep up. In the lunchroom, even the kids who were the most active in speaking English to Student often preferred to converse with their friends in their native French, all the while Student was left alone.
And yet, the question of fairness extends beyond the linguistic dimension of Student’s day-to-day life in their school. In the summer of 2024, French voters cast their ballots for the European Parliament in early June and for the Assemblée nationale (National Assembly) in late June and early July. As has often been in the case in European elections in recent years, migration and ethnic/racial identity were central to the electoral campaign in often controversial ways. Daniel Grenon, a legislator from the far-right Rassemblement national (National Rally) party, proposed in a debate that Maghrebian French citizens should be barred from holding public office, stating “Maghrebians arrived in power in 2016, but those people don’t belong in high places.” Éric Zemmour, the leader of the far-right Reconquête (Reconquest) party, came under fire for posting a video in which he danced along to the song “Je partira pas” (“I willn’t [sic] leave”), whose lyrics include lines such as:
“‘I willn’t go’
But yes, you will go
And sooner than you think
We’ve given you enough
Now, you can get the hell out of here Good riddance
And don’t you come back”
These are, of course, only two examples out of a plethora of racially charged controversies. Yet, at their cores, each of these events directly relates to the far-right exploiting a pre-existing social angst around ethnic, racial, and religious diversity in France. A June 2024 survey conducted by France’s Human Rights Commission found that over the past year, anti-Semitic hate crimes have increased by 284% while Islamophobic hate crimes have increased by 29%. Likewise, a 2023 survey found that 91% of French Black respondents had been victims of racial discrimination “often” or “from time to time.”
Sociological and anthropological research shows that race is socially constructed, meaning that the markers by which we gauge someone’s racial identity are constantly shifting based on societal dynamics. However, one of the more consistent markers of being an “Other,” someone who isn’t well integrated into a given majority group, is language — be it a question of accent, dialect, or whether or not one can even speak the language. Natalie Wilmot argues that language is a key marker of social identity; therefore, when we don’t speak a language “perfectly,” we reveal ourselves to not be full members of that social group. It was in this racially fraught context that Student, a migrant student from the Middle East who could not speak French, began to study at a largely monolingual school. I believe that Student’s age, given that they were only an elementary schooler, offered them some protection from the startlingly racist environment in which they lived, but if no wide-scale changes are quickly effectuated in France, it will only be a matter of time before Student is subjected to discrimination, prejudice, and hatred.
What about that is fair? Should we not also care about that?
I can’t say what the future holds for Student, or for any other French migrant student with limited French proficiency. But I can say that I am afraid for them — for their physical and mental wellbeing — and I can only hope that the French political landscape becomes more accepting of social and linguistic differences.
