[LCM Articles] "Rambo has replaced Rimbaud" (Toronto Star)

[Loai Naamani]

English is cool in trendy Beirut TheStar.com - News - English is cool in
trendy Beirut 

Pushes aside French as the language of status in Lebanese capital

October 08, 2007 

Oakland Ross
Middle East Bureau



BEIRUT–There's a deal being offered on Mazda automobiles in this frenetic
Middle Eastern capital, a city where little stays the same for long.

"Turn me on," urges a billboard on Zalka St. in the east end of Beirut.
"Zero down payment, 1.99 per cent interest. Limited quantity."

Sounds good – but what is most intriguing about this advertisement is not
the nature of the offer. It is the nature of the language in which the offer
is being made.

The offer is being made in English – and only in English.

The same goes for much, if not most, of the brash outdoor advertising that
sprouts like gaudy thickets of mercantilism along the boulevards and avenues
of Beirut. 

"The Chivas Life." "For Burger Lovers!" "Chicken Your Way." "Sally Hansen
Line Freeze for Lips."

Never mind the absence of French – long the language of choice for cultured
Lebanese – there isn't even a single Arabic character to be found on most of
these signs.

"English is cool," said a Western diplomat in Beirut. "If you're hip and
you're young, you speak English."

You do if you are Lebanese.

According to Christian Merville, an editorial writer at L'Orient Le Jour,
Lebanon's only French-language daily newspaper, English has
incontestablement (indisputably) supplanted French as the language of status
in this resolutely status-conscious land. Or, as Merville, puts it: "Rambo
has replaced Rimbaud."

He's referring, in the first instance, to the action hero played by American
Sylvester Stallone in a series of 1980s movie thrillers and, in the second
instance, to the mercurial 19th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud.

It's a play on words, but the point is clear. English – particularly
American English – has muscled French aside in this Mediterranean land,
whose capital was once known as le Paris du Moyen-Orient. The Paris of the
Middle East.

In many ways, the sobriquet remains apt.

Despite the pummelling it has suffered during a succession of wars, Beirut
continues to boast an array of continental charms, including fine
restaurants, an exuberant nightlife, a sophisticated café culture, and
enduring ties to a certain former imperial power whose capital is the Paris
of Europe.

Increasingly, however, when les citoyens et citoyennes of Lebanon converse
with the outside world – or even among themselves – they do so in English,
not French.

Granted, Arabic remains the sole official tongue of the country properly
known as Al-Joumhouriya al-Lubnaniya. But even Arabic is starting to buckle
somewhat under the globalizing force of English.

This is Merville's view, anyway. He believes that Arabic speakers in Lebanon
increasingly express themselves in an impoverished vocabulary and tired
clichés.

"There's a decline in the quality of French," he said, "but there is also an
extraordinary decline in Arabic."

Arabic, of course, has been spoken in these lands for millennia. French,
however, arrived in the late 19th century, when Jesuit clergy in France
sought to counter increasing Protestant influence in the region by
dispatching legions of missionaries to the mountainous eastern shores of the
Mediterranean.

Following the break-up of the Ottoman Empire in 1922, the territory now
called Lebanon became a French protectorate, an arrangement that lasted only
a quarter-century. But Parisian influence – linguistic and otherwise –
endured long after Lebanon became an independent state in 1946.

"Cultured Lebanese were all educated in French-speaking countries," said
Ghassan Moukheiber, a Beirut lawyer.

Even families that could not afford to send their children abroad typically
dispatched them to local schools where the language of instruction was
French, not Arabic.

Explanations vary for the recent ascent of English.

Some observers here – oddly, these individuals tend to be native French
speakers – advance the view that English is a "simpler," less challenging
tongue than French.

But others note that English opens more doors nowadays than French ever
could. It is the primary language of the Internet, for example, as well as
the lingua franca of industrial and commercial globalization.

In Lebanon, as in much of the world, U.S. television and films are a
powerful cultural force, easily exceeding the influence of their French
counterparts.

At the same time, Lebanese citizens who may be contemplating an
international move – as many do – are far more likely to be accepted as
immigrants in English-speaking countries such as Australia, Canada or the
United States than they are by France.

"English," said a French-speaking diplomat, "is a lot more useful if you
want to go abroad." 

Still, French is far from dead in Lebanon. Especially among gatherings of
well-educated folk, it is not uncommon nowadays to hear the conversation
shift easily from Arabic, to English, to French, and back again.

"It's a wonderful trilingual country," said the Western diplomat. "In a
single sentence, you will hear all three languages."

And, although dramatic and unmistakable, the current shift toward English is
not uniformly spread among all of Lebanon's four million citizens.

Fluency in French is still highly prized in the affluent Ashrafiye district
of Beirut, for example, a neighbourhood mostly populated by Maronite
Christians, for whom the language of Voltaire continues to imply good
breeding and high economic status.

The country's large Shia Muslim community, meanwhile, is said to be the
sector of Lebanese society most drawn to English, but no group in the
country is immune to the economic opportunities or the cultural appeal now
associated with the language of – well, of Sylvester Stallone. 

Repos dans la paix, Arthur Rimbaud. Rest in peace.

 

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