A Comparative Study Of The International Spread Of English And French

In the contemporary global linguistic landscape, English has been enthroned as the Global Language while French has been left far behind with a gradual lowering international status and a constant shrinking linguistic market. Moreover, France now has to frequently face the painful abandonment of French by some states or speakers which previously used French as an official language. Domestic prior literature hasn’t elaborated the opposite progressions of English and French international spread, nor systematically illuminated the essence and fundamental reason of their reverse development. Speaking from the level of practical language behavior, the spread of one language (including English and French) is attributed to language users’choices to study and use it. The careful examination of the question leads to the tentative construction of a language choice model, consisting of the subject(s) who make(s) a language choice, in what kind of environment, out of what kind of motivation mechanism and its consequent result. Therefore, whether Engish and French can accomplish its spread or not fundamentally depends on the language attitudes which potential subjects have formed in their environments.From the viewpoint of political economics, and based on the above language choice model, this study investigates the international spread of English and French in three environments where subjects (as group-level subjects) in former British and French colonies, former French-speaking colony Rwanda (as a national-level subject) and European Union (as a supranational-level subject) made their respective language choices as case studies to analyze the current opposite trends of English and French in their international spread progression. The study concludes that the overall reality of US-led globalization attributes different language values to English and French and determines what kind(s) of linguistic needs subjects in the world mainly have; that the global permeation of neo-liberalism to a large extent forms the very ideological basis for subjects to crystallize their opposite language attitudes towards English and French; and that the language spread policies implemented by US, Britain and France for English and French exert positive or negative effects to a certain degree upon the efficiency of the international spread of the two languages. The above three elements form an interactive network which fundamentally determines whether English or French subjects have chosen. The choices collectively reflect the current opposite spread trends of English and French.Both the current enthronement of English as the global linguistic hegemony and the gradual fading of French’s past glories is fundamentally an impressive manifestation of the contemporary unbalanced international political and economic order in the linguistic domain, which accordingly creates the global linguistic order. Though academic innovation in research topic, research perspective, theoretical development, and various notions, this study is intended to narrow the research gap in language spread studies and provide both practical and theoretical inspirations for the international spread of Chinese.