By Daniel de Roulet

Let us begin by a story that involves none of us, a Belgian story:

It could not happen here,
But in Belgium
Back in the winter of 2001
A Belgian train running at full speed
Was suddenly blocked by an emergency signal
It risked a collision
With another train on the same track

The Flemish conductor who stopped
Phoned the other mechanic
Who replied in Walloon
The Flemish conductor thought he understood:
Go ahead.
While the other was telling him to halt.
Both trains resumed full speed.
When the two conductors
Found themselves face to face
There was no time to reach for a dictionary
Just before they died.
In our country, such a thing is impossible
In our country
Train conductors are true Swiss

So this could not happen, to either the Swiss or the French. In any case, in Switzerland, just to name the mountains, one must know several languages.

When on a clear day, perched on one of our two mountain ranges, the Jura, we admire the second mountain range, the Alps, they speak to us in different tongues.

To the right, our mountains speak French. Despite what a rough translation might let you presume, the Dents du Midi (3257 meters above sea level) are not the Mittagshorn (3892), the Diablerets (3210) not the Diavolezza (2973), the Dent Blanche (4357) not the Weisshorn (4505).

On our left, our mountains speak German. Translating their names, we understand what they try to hide. So the Mönch (4107) next to the Jungfrau (4158) is the Monk gazing at the Maiden. The Faulhorn (2681), is the Lazy One and Vrenelisgärtli (2904), is Vreneli’s Garden. In this particular case, Vreneli is not our 20-franc gold coin, but a naked young girl whose garden, a down-pointing black triangle, is no less than her sex.

Further to the right, the Pizza Naira (2870) is not the product of a pizzeria, but the equivalent of the Black Peak. In Ticinese dialect, the Cima del Cantun (3354) describes the highest mountain of the canton.

At the language barrier, certain mountains even treat themselves to more than one name. So, above Zermatt, one finds the Matterhorn (4477) that, seen from Italy, rises above Cervinia. Latins call it il Cervino, or le Cervin.

Should one of these languages disappear, the mountains would remain, but they no longer would speak to us. The Switzerland I am talking about is a country where mountains have several names. However, what would happen if the system no longer worked?

In my small country, one tends to believe that a generous agreement has been made. Article 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says that language, just as religion, color or nationality cannot become a pretext for discrimination among individuals.

I like to think that one way of applying this rule might be:

Language may not become a pretext for discrimination among individuals, neither in their work, nor in their relations with the State nor in their loves.

At first glance, such a declaration sounds like one more article in the long list of a generous charter, which former foes might have signed at the end of a war of languages. One cannot imagine anyone refuting it.

However, if I observe not the general and generous declarations but the day-by-day reality of a country that considers itself multilingual, I cannot but see a less optimistic situation.

My country officially pretends to recognize four languages. For those who only know of Switzerland through its dangerous red knives banned in planes and its mountains, I would like to point out one particularity: 4/5 of its inhabitants speak German, 1/5 speak a Latin language (French, Italian, Romantsch) and a little more than 1/5 of its inhabitants are foreigners. If you add it up, you come to 6/5. That is because in the total, we usually neglect to count the 21% of foreigners with no political rights who live in Switzerland, greater in number than the 18% Francophones. This is our federal mathematics.

Talking about my country, I will limit myself to three sectors: our professional relations, political relations and private relations. Three P’s to explore: profession, politics, private life.

In professional life, this usually begins in the upper echelon. Some day, under the influence of a boss who believes he is world-minded and who, because of this, happens to speak English himself, all internal communications are decreed to be carried on in English. Then all meetings. Looking at this more closely, one must realize that for someone who speaks German, English is closer to his native language than for someone who speaks French. So those who have studied in an American University keep and consolidate their linguistic advantage. Once this process is set up, it cannot be reversed. Technical documents of the firm are from now on in English, the scientific communications also and Human Resources begin to recruit personnel with job interviews partly conducted in English. This is what happened to me as early as 1981, when I presented myself for a position of computer scientist attached to the University of Geneva. Ever since, this trend has taken over. Because in the schools, the apprenticeship of national languages has been sadly neglected, it has become quite impossible to impose an alternative to English.

Conclusion: in business relations, in a country that advocates understanding between national languages but does not give its inhabitants the means to master them, a foreign language (English), could allow discrimination to be reinforced against a minority.

In politics and in the administration, is there similar discrimination? Not openly, at least. On the contrary, to highlight a vaunted policy of openness in the more ideological rather than the economic sectors, one often sees the Latin language minority over represented. This is notably the case in the Federal Council where, from long tradition, two out of the seven members are Latin. In the same manner, in the cultural delegations that represent our country as many Latins as German-speaking Swiss are willingly sent abroad. But, as soon as economics is in the offing, these subtle calculations of quotas give way to power plays. Right now, on the Federal level, decision-makers are still bilingual. It is, in fact, quite astounding to see how bilingual speakers are dominant among the political personnel of the State. This tends to prolong the old dream of a country where the linguistic communities understand each other’s language. However, already in professional groups, be they chimney sweeps, football players or café-and-restaurant owners, the top associations are often run by steering committees that can no longer hold a meeting without the help of an interpreter. The case of writers - more and more closed to bilingualism - is highly symbolic. They too, in their national committee, will have to decide whether to communicate in English.

Switzerland has recently given up a principle, the willingness to learn the other’s language. French no longer will be the first language taught to German-speaking children in Zurich. So-called “precocious” English taught in the early grades has replaced it. In time, the inhabitants of German-speaking Switzerland will no longer understand what the French-speaking Swiss are talking about. The long-term scenario is that political power could belong more and more to those who speak the majority language. They will monopolize the posts of the entire national administration. In addition, for the few Latin-language speakers of the remaining minority, all exchanges will be carried on in English.

Conclusion: in a country that politically pretends not to have a single national language in order to cling to multilingualism but no longer encourages mutually learning the other’s language, political power could in the end belong only to those who speak the language of the majority. The linguistic majority will use a foreign language to communicate with the linguistic minority.

What are left are private relations. No one should be discriminated in his loves because of language. Uttered this way, this claim seems ridiculous. However, imagine a child who speaks a different language than his grandparents. They will never be able to speak together. I myself brought up a son whose grandmother speaks Italian. At the table, she just smiles at her grandson who smiles back at her. Language problems do not seem to bother them. There is far worse than the loving silence of a grandmother from Ticino. But to carry this private example further, my son, who is now twenty and for ten years was taught another national language, German, in school found himself quite unable to speak it when he met a girl in Zurich. Together, they spoke English. Recently, they broke up, explaining that to build a love story one must be able to share a common language. Despite the ease of moving between the different linguistic parts of the country, mutual lack of understanding is on the rise. Private reasons to live together are disappearing. My father, who was born in Geneva 85 years ago, married my mother who came from Zurich. For 60 years, not a day has passed that one of them has not spoken a few sentences in the language of the other. This kind of model no longer exists and their grandson is a sad illustration of this failure. The school system has failed. Has the will to live together become weaker? What happens in Switzerland reminds us of Czechoslovakia, Canada, and Belgium. Spare us a comparison with Yugoslavia.

Conclusion: in the private sector, a country that no longer cares to teach its children the language of the other prepares for its people conditions that could lead first to a winding down of linguistic communication, and in time to a breakup.

My three conclusions in the professional, political and private sectors seem pessimistic. When summed up, they contradict the generous principles of my imaginary rules against language discrimination. I am pessimistic about our linguistic model, but not about our national will to live together. In addition, I could give many examples.

To end this section of that describes the situation in my beloved country, here is another true story:

Last summer, just after the 1st of August
Our National Holiday,
A specialist of our rivers
Canoe instructor besides
Left Lucern
For his vacation in Ticino
As each year for fifteen years
He took along his canoe to challenge
A mighty alpine torrent
The evening before he phoned
The keeper of the dam
As each year for fifteen years
He phoned
To ask if there was any danger:
Also morgen gibt’s keine Gefahr? Sicher?
(So tomorrow, there is no danger? Sure?)
The dam keeper replied:
Bondi Siur. Cosa vuole ? Non capisco
(Good day, Sir. What do you want? I do not understand)
The canoe instructor:
Verstanden. Keine Gefahr
(Understood. No danger)
The dam keeper:
Ma ditte esatamente cosa vuolete.
(Tell me exactly what you want)
The canoe instructor
As each year for fifteen years
Das nächste Jahr werde ich Italienisch lernen
(Next year I will learn some Italian)
The next morning the canoe instructor
Launched his boat
However, the keeper opened the dam
One was surprised to die
The other just said:
Questi qui non sanno niente dei nostri fiumi.
(Those guys don’t understand a thing about our rivers)

This is a dreadful story of course, but I will not make too much of it. This story is impossible in Italy, the Italians would say, nor in Germany, the Germans would say, nor in France, would say the French. So, let us look at France where they pretend to speak a single language.

When I listen to the conversations of teenagers who attend the lycées of the center of Paris, I am struck by their accent when they speak French. One would imagine that these sons of bourgeois come out of the suburbs and that at home they speak to their parents in Arabic or in Tamazight. They have acquired Arab accents. Do they realize it? Do they speak like this to their teachers who quiz them on Racine or Chateaubriand? It seems almost incredible: by mimicry, the young girls and boys of the 5th and 6th arrondissements chat in the rhythmic and subtly guttural accent of North African immigrants whose French is not their native tongue. Add a certain style, some clothing fads, but this is nothing new. In the States, too, the children of middle-class New Yorkers’ ape the kids of the black ghettoes. However, in Paris as in all the large French cities, they copy not just the look, but also a linguistic deformation.

At first, there may have been a notion of derision in this way of speaking, or was it a way to show solidarity with marginals? Now it seems to be a sort of self-discrimination, a way to evade the norm to integrate, a way to say: we are all French-speaking outsiders.

This linguistic manner that I notice is the opposite of the centralizing and universalistic model developed until now by the thinkers of the French Republic. At the time of the Revolution, hardly half of France could speak French. Now that standardized French has become homogeneous, its power is challenged by a foreign accent used in the very heart of its capital.

The fact is that language is colored from the bottom, just as a length of cloth dipped in dye absorbs color by every fiber. French tinged by Arabic, and soon other African languages, is simply doing what happens or has happened to other languages, from the Latin of the clerics to the English of the tour operators. The purity of French - defending and illustrating it - is but a phantasm of those in power who want to hang onto their comfortable seats, either in the Académie Française or in the Government.

The unique language, the French of France just as the English of the British Isles lives on by absorbing, whatever the cost, the accent, the words, the terms of those who were the last to learn it. In the case of France, the peasants, and now the immigrants.

When one considers how languages develop, one can only be optimistic: language remains alive and always tells the battle of the margins to push their color to the center. That is why the bad French of the Parisian students offers me quite mischievous amusement whenever I return to the capital. The story of the Swiss-German and his canoe may someday occur in a French suburb. One must accept it and remain optimistic.

Along with a few millions of French-speaking people in Quebec, Belgium, the Antilles, more and more Africans and Asians, we French-Swiss share the pleasure of tweaking and teasing the French language from the outside. The French of France call us Francophones. They would hardly be flattered to be included in this category. They speak of it as a peripheral situation outside the French Hexagon. They are French. We are but Francophones.

Let us accept their distinction, let us admit right from the start that Francophones are only those who speak French outside of France. And from here, let us begin to analyze our own relationship to the spoken language then to the written language.

The French-speaking part of Switzerland may serve as an example of the spoken language as used by Francophones. But the same reasoning might be applied by analogy to any other French-speaking outsiders, as I like to point out with the Parisian student example.It may apply also to the Swiss speaking German or Italian. And even more: each language, which lives near another one, makes it clear that linguistic fundamentalism is impossible to sustain.

Sometimes on the train, I listen in on conversations. Not to know what is being said but to observe how it is said. I recognize our slips from standard French: the particular use of possessive pronouns, local expressions, redundant syntax, and even syllables inverted as in German names, to avoid Frenchifying them

I recognize also our minimalism. No lengthy sentences, many exclamations, simple rules. Not saying much more than mimicry can express. Living at the frontier of languages, we ourselves know languages are mortal. Our neighbors, the Swiss-Germans speak a dialect that is living out its very last century. We already gave up our patois with not too much pain and linguistic marginality does not scare us. If we speak this way, it is not to add to the folklore collection of Francophone dictionaries but simply to proudly defy standardization.

Vocabulary, syntax, accents, we might be only the victims of regional variations from the norm. But listening carefully to what we pretend are full sentences, we must admit we are far from the French standard. Our words line up hesitantly to stop anywhere as soon as the person in front of us seems to nod assent. Why bother to make up the rest of a wordy sentence? For us, every word counts. If we hear no more assenting grunts, it is a sign we have been understood. Talking to say nothing special, one ends up by thinking with no ideas. We are not scared of silence.

A lengthy pause in French, German or Italian may mean the same as several useless phrases from Paris, Berlin or Rome. Or even equal a whole meaningless conversation. The gift of the gab was not poured into us from a metric French baby bottle. If our lingua interrupta had to be justified, we might well evoke our jerky thought process, we might say that a secondary level of understanding comes from such an economy of means. The minimalist way we express ourselves is not, in our case, a trait of provincial cunning, but a modest way of trying not to be too outgoing, a manner that avoids showing off. Yes, every word is an effort and we often like to tell our subordinates that they chatter far too much.

The reasons for this state of affairs and its history seem well known. The partisans of an ethnic theory of languages put the blame for the French on our closeness to German playing tricks upon us. They say that Germanisms would infest not only our speech but also our thoughts. Within every French-Swiss, would slumber a German-Swiss who wakes up whenever we start thinking. It is the same for the Quebecois, who are likely to think in English, or the Walloons who think in Flemish or the French-speaking Algerians who think in Arabic.

Among other explanations, we, in Switzerland, would suffer from cultural backwardness because our sky is hemmed in by mountains.

The cleverest ethnologists blame our distance from the creative center of standardized French, German or Italian. We live so far from the heart that we would be unable to share the rich intellectual life that gives our language its power and radiance.

Those who would teach us to speak our language properly really blame us not so much for trying to avoid standard usage but for challenging its authority. Because language establishes rights, law, order. To speak properly is to think properly, to submit to the accepted code. A hint of illegitimacy taints our mother tongue. Its hesitant ways irreverently mock power.

Fortunately, many of us think, writing allows us to express ourselves without the accent of our free mountains ever giving us away. Since, hampered by our many hesitations, it is so hard for us orally, it would seem easier to write. Being poor talkers, just like weak students, we might fare better in writing. In spite of everything, we would reach the universal. In writing, the difference between French and Francophones, German and Germanophones would no longer be perceptible. Yet. Reading the mail from our administration, or the local sections of our dailies, we can spot at a glance, the indelible stamp of provincialism, padded, glossed, ironed-out by the word processor but oh so treacherous. The writing of our local notables, of our sports writers and our electrical services seems to reproduce in every sentence the jagged outline of our Jura pines along the horizon. Even when our language aims for the smoothness of a plane tree in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, it retains its spiky needles all winter long.

Therefore, it remains only for literature - from fiction to the poems of our writers - to erase the flaws of our speech.

This might be our most heroic attempt to escape the stamp of the local landscape. Finally, we would join, in the same care of writing well, all who are devoted to a single language. Has it succeeded? Has literature any chance of success?

Where speech is marked by its peripheral state, can the passion for literature, as by magic, build a strong center that escapes local influence? There are two answers to this question of Francophone literature. Two contradictory solutions face off. One believes itself universal, the other specific.

According to the first - the universal one - outsider peripheral speech in no way impedes a central way of writing, since speaking and writing are two traditions with a separate existence. One - speech - is passed along by word of mouth. The other - literary tradition - is transmitted from parchment to fine paper. This theory has solid and prestigious partisans, even in our region.

Therefore, it would be through literature itself that our own literary production is forged. Can one dare doubt this - richly documented, culturally correct way - of seeing? To claim a literary inheritance out of any constraint of space or time is the foundation of classicism. However, this means we must give up our language’s own history. We know that is impossible. That is why classicism is often closely watched by academism.

All over, many defiant proclamations are multiplying. For some time now, authors no longer write to defend and illustrate their language. They write to subvert it, to insert an element of doubt, targeting the clichés and the dominant way of thinking.

This was the universalistic option. The second - specific - option offers just the opposite. It recognizes the filiations of literature to the spoken language. It admits that from a different language comes a different literature. Can it deny the outsider peripheral situation and erect its own center? This was the choice of French-speaking Swiss writer Ramuz. Yes, he said, we live far from the Academy, the heavy plane of our language levels our thoughts, paring off its own rough shavings.

Ramuz, like Céline and a few others wanted to re-establish the continuity between spoken and written language. He began not with the sentence, an arrangement of words meant to be written down but from the statement, the way our thoughts turn into words. He noticed the growing abyss between our school-taught literature and the popular linguistic reality existing at the beginning of the 20th century. He did not imitate oral speech, even less did he transcribe it. However, he ceased to ignore it. For Ramuz, there were not two antagonist filiations, but only one that anchors itself in speech, detours through writing, and returns.

What remains of these attempts today? Faced with linguistic hesitation, two extreme options to found literary projects were attempted. One was classicism, the other was known as regionalism. Both reached dead ends. Nevertheless, the question remains. How to create a literature from a spoken language so unsure of itself? Unsure French, unsure German, unsure English?

For the last fifty years, the gap between spoken and written language has widened even more. Speech, assisted by recorders, has found the lasting character from which writing once gained its nobility. With the democratization of recording that allows us to fill tape after tape, literature is seeking another status. Since speech-processing tools will next allow us to turn dictation into words on a screen, we can no longer pretend that written text illuminates thinking any more than does the spoken word.

Is French a special case? In fifty years, French has become one of the languages where the gap between writing norm and spoken usage has increased the most. Neither in German, Spanish nor Italian does one find today such a divergence together such an anxiety about the so-called invariability of the written word. The refusal of the slightest spelling reform in French offers but one illustration. This makes the French example the most advanced.

So here we are: back from classic tradition, disappointed by regionalism - universalism limited to Paris or Berlin (itself the most pompous variation of regionalism - and confronted besides with a linguistic tool confiscated by the techniques of reproducing it. Moreover, in such conditions we should go cultivate our own four literatures!

Instead of bewailing this, we can instead consider our state of peripheral outsiders as a stroke of luck. In more ways than one. The good luck to live far away from power, far from calculations, compromises and passing fads. Then, the good luck to face more radically each day the gap between the language of the mouth and the language of the pen.

Our luck as language outcasts is to live each day this conflict between what one might say and our halting diction. Céline one day noticed that the difference between himself and people in power was that their language was dead even before it was set down on paper. Whereas his language, at least once, had been alive. Therefore, our doubts about our unsure manner of speaking force us to choose between the living and the dead branches of our language. People who keep such a language alive are called half-breeds. We should accept the term as proudly as did Joyce, he who was from neither Dublin nor London but a sort of an Anglophone half-breed. So we could decide to speak proudly French, German or Italian as it is spoken in Switzerland.

From the Jura to the Atlas Mountains, we, who speak French, willfully endanger the academic standardization that tries to purify language, as others would cleanse ethnic races. Our linguistic hesitancy is our own treasure. There is no need to envy the old-time inflated style of literary people close to the center of power. They who believed their literature was universal have discovered its commercial frailty. They thought they might recapture its vigor by noisily clamoring for a cultural exception that otherwise confirmed the rules of global exchange. Soon these critics of our marginal status will also discover that they too are a mere sub-system. They who disdained our hesitation will themselves begin to hesitate. Just a little more effort, we all will be Francophones !

Then, having at last accepted our condition - detached from power and displaced as peripheral language outsiders - we will discover that our linguistic hesitation is the most commonly shared quality in the world. And on that piece of common sense, we construct our texts.

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