Passing for French

I consider myself very lucky to have dual nationality; I have two countries. Two cultures. Two languages? It’s complicated…

Born to an English father and a French mother, I grew up in the UK. There was a common misconception in the 70s and 80s that growing up in a bilingual household made it difficult for children to master their first language, and with my mother herself seeking to perfect her English and assimilate in a foreign country, we spoke only English at home, so my siblings and I didn’t learn French as children.

Actually it’s even more complicated than that: when I was just three, my family moved to France for roughly a year, so I did my first year of pre-school in France. Being just a toddler, I picked up French very quickly – seemingly unaware that I was learning it. According to a family anecdote, at some point early in the school year, I overheard a family member asking my mother how my French was coming along, prompting me to say to her (in French) “I wish I could speak French”.

In a reversal of our previous life back in Blighty, my father insisted we speak French at home so that he could learn as much as possible, and after being immersed in a mostly French environment for nearly 12 months, when we returned to England, I realised to my great dismay that I could no longer communicate with my best friend. People often say kids are like sponges, but they forget to mention that sponges don’t retain water very well, and sure enough – once I had returned to an all-English environment – I proceeded to lose most of my French as quickly as I had lost my English before it.

However, due to this formative experience (as well as regular holidays in France), I retained some basic notions of French, some useful everyday vocabulary, and a fairly decent accent. This had pros and cons; GCSE French, for example, was a doddle – the downside being that I was constantly pestered by my classmates to give them the answers.

We would spend most of our Easter and summer holidays (six to eight weeks a year) in France visiting my maternal grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins – most of whom couldn’t speak English. These regular trips meant I was acutely aware of my French identity. However, having two identities is difficult to manage as a teenager; I remember, on the one hand, being called a ‘frog’ in secondary school, for example, while another time a girl refused to believe that I was half-French. She insisted that I was making it up for some reason. I remember my indignation (“why would I make something like that up?”), but in hindsight, I kind of understand her incredulity: I live in England, I speak English (including to my mum), I have no exterior signs of Gallicism – I didn’t even have a French passport. How could I can claim to be French in any real sense?

I think this insecurity was one of the main reasons why I chose to study French at university, which enabled me to do year abroad and forge a stronger connection to ‘the motherland’. However, after graduating and finding work in France, I was once again confronted with the paradox of a dual identity. Due to my early exposure to French, I had retained a fairly good accent, and most people did not notice the occasional grammatical mistakes or curious intonations on certain words. However, in the first years after moving to France, I was reliably betrayed by a distinct lack of vocabulary.

Imagine the embarrassment of realising that you didn’t know the word for ‘Blu tack’ and having to do an elaborate sort of mime to explain what you want with a long queue of impatient people behind you, or explaining an ailment to your doctor and becoming aware that you didn’t know that there was a French word for the back of the neck. My brother has a similar anecdote of having to order “deux croissants” because he could not remember if ‘croissant’ was a masculine or feminine noun.

This almost inevitably resulted in me having to self-consciously answer the “where are you from?” question. I was always torn between wanting to explain that I am half-French but that I grew up in England, but it was generally easier to just say I am English. Moreover, on the occasions that I did say that I am half-French, people would invariably reply “ah, that explains it.” As if I spoke fluent French from birth, by dint of nationality, and I hadn’t spent 20 years perfecting it.

Even more frustratingly, certain French colleagues seemed to take great pleasure in teasing me when France beat England in the Six Nations tournament, no matter how many times I testily explained that I am actually French. People’s inability to accept me as their countryman was compounded when I moved back to the UK for work, where my English colleagues were more than happy to adopt me as fully English, despite the fact that I came from head office.

As a football fan, although France and England rarely play each other, certain major international tournaments have represented an opportunity to stress-test my claim of feeling French. I was slightly flummoxed by my feelings of frustration when a certain Zinedine Zidane (one of my all-time favourite players) scored two late goals to lead France to a 2-1 victory over England at Euro 2004. I put this ambivalence down to the fact that France had seen recent success (WC 1998 and Euro 2000), whereas England had not (and have still not) won a major tournament since 1966. I had similar mixed feelings when France (reigning world champions at the time) beat England at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, not least because England played admirably for most of the game. But I can also honestly claim to have felt a genuine sense of pride when an 18-year-old Kilian Mbappé inspired a swashbuckling young France team to a 3-2 win over England in 2017.

I attended that match in person, and it is still one of my most enduring memories of football, not only because I was conscious of witnessing the emergence of a brilliant new generation of French footballers, but also because it contributed to helping me understand my personal sense of national identity. Hearing the French Republican Guard perform 'Don't look back in anger' as a mark of respect for the victims of the Manchester Arena bombings – just as the English had sung the Marseillaise at Wembley in November 2015 in honour of the victims of the Bataclan – was deeply moving. These two events were particularly important to me as a football supporter with dual nationality because it was a rare case of fraternity transcending partisan footballing rivalry, where opposing supporters seemed to recognise their common humanity and attachment to humanistic ideals; for a brief moment, it seemed that people could both be attached to their own culture and embrace civic nationalism without harbouring hostility towards people of other countries.

I have now lived in France for almost exactly as long as I lived in England and, when people ask me, I tend to say that I feel 50-50. In a sense, I almost feel more French. England seems practically exotic when we go back, and as a British national living in Europe, Brexit has left me feeling slightly estranged from my homeland. However, I have also come to believe that the notion of being 'half-French' or 'half-English' doesn't really make sense. It doesn't say on my passport or identity card that I have a lower form of citizenship. To say that I am 'half-French' is like admitting that I am only partly French, whereas from a legal perspective I am fully French, even if I do enjoy dual nationality.

Although I don’t quite master French idioms in the way that a native speaker might, my written French is as good as most of my French compatriots, and I can generally pass as French in most situations, which remains a source of satisfaction. Being fully bilingual is hard. Although multilingualism is the norm at global level – more than 50% of people worldwide speak more than one language fluently – one language is often dominant. Not everyone with dual nationality is lucky enough to grow up in a bilingual environment, and that’s okay. As I have discovered, your dominant language doesn’t define who you are, and being French is about more than just 'passing for French'.