Sorry to have been abruptly off-line so long. The problem was part a sudden change in holiday plans, part connection hassles in a village in the S. of France and part keeping an eye on a perfect EU microcosm of mixed-language (FR, DN, GER, SP) kids, aged 5 to 12, who inevitably had English as their lingua franca, with the oldest acting as interpreter between FR and ENG for the FR monolingual Sara and FR-GER bilingual Maha. No Occitan speakers, apparently, though that was the original language of the village in which they were all playing. As it happens, there’s a reference from Eurolang to a new report published on the French site by the International Organization of Francophony (OIF) claiming that “the enlargement of the EU has further weakened the position of the French language”. Nonsense of course — what they are really complaining about is the weakening of the influence of French (geo)political ideas. It is part of France’s genius to identify the content with code. Now back to some real blogging.