![]() Even the word patois can have a pejorative sense in the French context, suggesting the disdain with which regional languages are regarded. How long was I learning French? Why was I learning Breton? Is Irish very different to English? How many people speak Irish? At parties with French people, they would speak to me misty-eyed about the few words of patois they remember from their grandmother back in Alsace or Normandy. Unsurprisingly, language was the main subject of conversion that year. It’s a binary that’s played out the world over within the hierarchy of languages. This other language was a gleaming highway to progress, opportunities, wealth, while the native language seemed like a cul de sac, an old mule hampered with poverty and backwardness. Migration made another language more desirable, more necessary. The historical suppression of a native language in the school system was a familiar narrative to me, though it doesn’t entirely explain away how a people ‘lose’ their language. This made me sceptical: if they felt that strongly about it, why not learn the language? As an Irish-speaker, I suppose I’m sensitized to the plight of other minority languages. Those who self-identified as Breton, rather than French, were usually quick to make that distinction known, though it didn’t necessarily signify that they spoke Breton. Meeting people was easy in the pub after a session as all of humanity seemed to gather there: Erasmus, non-Erasmus, Breton, French. Even the clumsiest of players can claim a certain allure in a foreign climate. It’s difficult to underestimate the appetite for Irish traditional music abroad. It was easy to feel at home among my Celtic brethren, and I soon found an Irish pub where musicians were welcome, including maladroit ones such as myself. I exchanged the stinging rain of the West of Ireland for the marginally more temperate rain of Brittany. In 2003 I arrived in Rennes as an Erasmus student to study French, a bit of Breton and Celtic Civilization. And it was through French that I encountered Europe in all its messy, multifarious splendour. Like many Irish people, I suspect, the French language was my first introduction to ‘the Continent’ and France became a synonym for Europe. French publishing houses produce beautiful editions, and though I couldn’t then read their contents, my eye was drawn to their sharp design. The combination of letters suggested a peculiar, alluring music. ![]() I can still recall their tantalizing spines: Gide, Mauriac, Zola, Colette. Are French books just more attractive than other books? My mother, a French teacher, had any number of books in French on the shelf at home when I was growing up.
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