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Brazilians Speak Portuguese, but the Olympics Must Use French

Michaëlle Jean is the secretary general of the International Organization of la Francophonie. “It’s a struggle each time you have the Olympic Games, in a different country and a different city,” she said.Credit...James Hill for The New York Times

RIO DE JANEIRO — Michaëlle Jean, secretary general of the International Organization of la Francophonie, spent a recent morning at the sultry Lagoa Olympic venue, where the world’s most exciting rowing was taking place. She was not so interested in what was happening on the water.

“You will notice that the commentators are not speaking French,” she said, indignantly. “In the venue, none of the signs are in French.”

Monitoring the use of French at the Olympics is a frustrating and quixotic job, particularly when the Games are being held in a non-French-speaking country preoccupied with non-French-related matters like street crime, economic chaos and how to cram thousands of excitable spectators into the beach volleyball venue. But Rule 23 of the Olympic charter states that the Games have two official languages, and Ms. Jean’s organization, which represents 80 Francophone countries, is determined to make sure nobody forgets that one of them is French (the other is English).

“It’s a struggle each time you have the Olympic Games, in a different country and a different city,” Ms. Jean said. “We must be there to make sure the French signs and documents and information are there. We have 3,000 athletes and a lot of people in the public from Francophone countries.”

Rule 23 is no accident. As the founder of the modern Olympic Games at the turn of the 20th century, Pierre de Coubertin got to choose what language they would be in, and he was French. But as the century wore on, and English became more dominant as a common international language, French usage at the Games began to fall by the wayside. This alarmed the French-speaking world and the Francophonie organization, one of whose goals, it says, is to “combat the perverse effects of globalization on languages.”

At each Olympics since Athens in 2004, the group has appointed a person known as le Grand Témoin — the Great Witness — whose job is to make the case for, and keep track of, French usage at the Games. This year’s Grand Témoin is the internationally celebrated jazz saxophonist Manu Dibango of Cameroon. (Ms. Jean, a former governor general of Canada, had the job in London in 2012.) Responsibilities include negotiating with the International Olympic Committee and the host country, closely monitoring the French situation at the Games, and producing a report afterward.

The reports tend to reflect a mixture of hopefulness and dismay.

“In Beijing, all Olympic signage appeared first in French, then English and Chinese,” the Sochi report says, for instance. “In Sochi, the signage addressing the international audience was trilingual, but that addressing the spectators appeared in Russian and English.”

In addition, it pointed out, “the arrival of some new sports to the Olympic program (slopestyle and halfpipe) was not accompanied by a terminology sufficient for these disciplines to be discussed with French terms in the media.”

The Olympics are “obviously a very important showcase,” said Mr. Dibango, who is also serving as a cultural ambassador, performing with Brazilian and French-speaking musicians in Rio as a way to promote the international nature of French.

“I see the job as being the flag-bearer of the 300 million people around the world who speak French,” Mr. Dibango said.

The average member of the public may have little idea that any of this is going on, but the Francophonie organization takes the issue so seriously that no sooner does one Olympics end than it starts negotiating the terms of the next one. Early discussions about French at the Rio Games were positive, Ms. Jean said, because the Brazilian government was sympathetic and because Carlos Nuzman, the president of the Brazilian organizing committee, speaks fluent French.

But then the economy collapsed and the friendly government fell. When the new government came in, it had a lot on its mind, and that did not include the use of French at the Olympics. As the day of the opening ceremony approached, the Francophonie organization had no idea how the evening — traditionally a fine time for the world to hear and appreciate a lot of beautifully enunciated French spoken by important international officials — would go.

It turned out to be a runaway success. All the main announcements and speeches were delivered in French, along with English and Portuguese. Even better, Ms. Jean said, “everything was announced first in French — did you notice?”

The opening ceremony is one thing; the rest of the Olympics is another. Ms. Jean visited the athletes’ village, only to discover that there were French-language signs in the cafeteria but nowhere else. She attributed it to Rio’s budget woes — translation is expensive — and the frantic nature of pre-Games preparations. While she understood, she said, “We were very disappointed at the situation.”

Visitors to the Games, too, will see that the thousands of signs at the various event venues are printed only in English and Portuguese, not in French. (Not that the English signs are anything to get excited about, seeming at times to owe more to Google Translate than to a sentient being. “Press the wheelchair button if you have locomotion issues,” a sign next to an elevator at the media center reads. )

At the rowing venue on Saturday, the events moved along so quickly that sometimes it was all the announcers could do to pack in the commentary in both Portuguese and English, never mind any other languages. In the stands, several (non-French-speaking) spectators said that, to be honest, language was not at the forefront of their minds.

“I hadn’t really thought about it,” said Amy Burba, 44, of Virginia. “But I heard the people behind us speaking French.”

Scott MacRae, a Scottish chef who was holding a beer and wearing his Union Jack on his head as a form of sun protection, said that except at the opening and closing ceremonies, French should be kept out of the Olympics.

“I like the French passion,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s appropriate to use French at the Olympics when you have them in a country that is not France.”

Several older-generation rowing officials at the site bemoaned the loss of French not just at the Olympics but also in sports (and in the world) in general. Americans in particular, they said, do not speak other languages and do not really want to.

French used to be the official language of rowing’s governing body, FISA, but it is now used less frequently, said Jean Christophe Rolland, FISA’s president. Even FISA, whose acronym stands for Fédération Internationale des Sociétés d’Aviron, has had to adopt a zippy English co-name, World Rowing, which it uses for “commercial purposes” but which is slipping more and more into the rowing lexicon, he said.

As Mr. Rolland talked nostalgically about the days when rowing meetings were held in French and English speakers had to listen to the translation on headphones, the Rolling Stones song “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” began playing over the loudspeakers.

“It’s a daily fight,” he said. “A daily fight.”

A correction was made on 
Aug. 9, 2016

An earlier version of this article misidentified the Olympics for which Michaëlle Jean was le Grand Témoin. It was the 2012 London Games, not the 2014 Sochi Games.

How we handle corrections

Victor Mather and Sam Dolnick contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: Brazilians Speak Portuguese, but Games Are Tied to French. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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