Alexandru Ionașcu
As is well known, Romania is part of the International Organization of Francophony, a structure that brings together countries from five continents where French is an official language or a language of communication with a certain tradition and cultural influence. In Romania’s case, this is due, of course, to the fact that Romanian belongs to the Neo-Latin language group alongside French, but also to the huge influence exerted by French culture and everything that France stood for throughout the 19th century and the first half of the last century. Indeed, after the union of the Principalities in 1859, the construction of modern Romania is linked to France. The first two Romanian universities in Iaşi (founded in 1860) and Bucharest (1864) were organized according to the model of French universities, and the first Romanian writers of the 19th century traveled to France and followed with interest what was happening in the literary world of the Hexagon (although, curiously, Eminescu was less so, his attraction gravitating towards German Romanticism). Entire literary currents were Romanian adaptations of what was happening in France, such as Symbolism and the interwar avant-garde. In general, everything that meant culture, theater, and intellectualism in Romania from early modernity to the mid-20th century was influenced by France. Neologisms, names of institutions, political doctrines, architecture, civil code, new technologies, and industrialization meant the French language to Romanians. The French language and culture had such a profound influence that Dan Alexe wondered how people spoke north of the Danube before, since even the Romanian adverb “deja” is actually “déjà” in French.
The status of the French language was so high during the four decades of authoritarian socialism that French continued to be taught in schools alongside Russian. Between 1948 and 1989, the decades of Romanian communism, French and Russian were taught in pre-university education, but only French was used by most writers and only French literature was read by anyone who was passionate about literature in Romania at that time. Starting in 1980, the first Romanian writers interested in post-war American literature and American mass culture in general appeared, known as the “optzeciști” (the generation of the eighties). The fall of communism and the development of information technology meant that English became the new lingua franca, while, on the cultural front, American mass culture gradually replaced French high culture. Absorbed by its own tradition, in which elitism and refinement had been hallmarks for at least three centuries, France was not particularly interested in developing a mass culture, such as the comic books and their film adaptations exemplified by the American market, Japanese manga, or genre films such as horror. With the advent of the internet, English became the lingua franca of the entire planet, while Romanian society, emerging from a decade of isolation and Ceauşescu-era austerity, was eager to learn about everything that was happening in the world, so to speak. In the first two post-communist decades, the first Romanian commercial television stations broadcast the most diverse programs imaginable, horror and fantasy films, documentaries about almost anything, from the supernatural to religious fundamentalism, programs about UFOs, and many cartoons, bringing joy to children and preteens somewhere in Eastern Europe at the end of the 20th century. And if I were to add the importance of MTV for generations of young people around the world, the impact of American English at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries is profound, and the decline of French rapid.
Until high school, I learned English almost exclusively from movies and cartoons broadcast on TV channels such as Cartoon Network and Fox Kids. Hanna-Barbera cartoons such as The Jetsons, The Flintstones, Top Cat, by the second or third grade I was eager to see Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) after discovering Japanese anime in first grade and becoming fascinated by it. The first anime I watched every day was UFO Robot Grendizer, broadcast on national television and subtitled in Romanian. I waited with bated breath for a whole week to see Tim Burton’s Batman, and after seeing the film, I read my first comic book featuring the caped crusader from Gotham. That was back when TVR 1, the Romanian national television station, still mattered and had diverse, quality content.
Millennials of my generation, born at the end of communism, are the first to be exposed almost exclusively to American mass culture and English-language content. The public education system at the time couldn’t ignore such a generational and cultural shift and offered English classes even at the primary level. In middle school, all classes had four hours of English per week, and the high school I attended had a bilingual English program. In 10th grade, I took an elective course in US history and was able to contextualize almost all the Hollywood movies I had seen before I turned ten. In fact, I learned my first words in English in kindergarten, when a teacher came to our class to teach us English, the language of Shakespeare, so to speak. The massive Anglicization of my post-communist millennial generation through American mass culture is certainly unprecedented in modern Romanian history. It is an unprecedented cultural transformation, even if one were to compare it to French at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, whose presence was always limited to the small bourgeoisie of the time. Unfortunately, this cultural transformation is not discussed at all today.
But what happened to the French language after the fall of communism in Romania? French continued to be taught in middle school, we had two hours of French a week, the same in high school. But almost no one paid any attention to these two hours of French; no one found them useful, even as a subject that could raise their grade point average, as was the case with religion. For eight years of school, from the beginning of middle school to the end of high school, French was simply there in the curriculum. We had textbooks and even exercise books, but even the most studious students were barely interested in learning a sentence in French. We were all frustrated that we had to use those accents. French was just there among the other subjects, more of a ghostly presence from a bygone era, a forgotten vestige than a subject that anyone took seriously like the others.
Although we had a French test in our high school final exams, all of us students felt that we had to learn something that had nothing to do with us, but with people from an unknown past. Many teachers in the Romanian pre-university system probably had the same impression of the French language. To me, at least, even Latin, which I studied from eighth grade through high school, seemed more relevant in terms of image, history, and prestige than French.
What was happening in the realm of pop culture? French was non-existent on television at the time. I only remember a cartoon with the heroine Enigma and some dubious cartoon that adapted the 1980s film Highlander into French. My first childhood interaction with French was a series of animated short films with no dialogue, only the credits at the beginning announcing the name of the episode in French. Who else from my generation of millennials remembers cartoons called Ernest Le Vampire?
My strangest story related to mass culture has nothing to do with French, but with German, of all languages. Until I was a teenager, I was fascinated by German TV shows. As a kid, I used to watch cartoons in German that I never saw anywhere else, like the 1980s Spider-Man animations, and I also watched the 1960s Batman series with Adam West on German TV channels. I didn’t understand the dubbed dialogue, but I discovered unknown facets of American culture that captured my imagination through a language much more mysterious than French, which was completely unknown to me at the time. I like to imagine that if my interest in German had developed back then, I would certainly have taken German classes in high school, studied German literature in college, and now I would be reading Novalis in German as I read Shakespeare in English.
What is the attitude of Romanian society today towards a language and culture so influential for our modernity? Indifference, to say the least. A friend told me that even in academia, there are fewer and fewer academics who know French, most prefer English, in the arts faculties most students enrol in English language and literature courses, and French seems to be present only in increasingly restricted university circles, among high school and middle school teachers and among those who are passionate about film festivals, where French still retains its famous refinement. Are there still French-speaking Romanians? The answer is no. Romanian writers do not have a large audience, and very few examples of contemporary mass culture originate in France. Perhaps Dan Alexe is right in believing that by moving away from French, Romanian is tearing itself away from its roots; all I can say is that a bookworm’s reading does not stop at classical literature.
Photo: Little Paris – Bucharest has a triumphal arch, just like the French capital (source: Pixabay, CC0)
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