Language Lessons from France's Michael Olise
The World Cup run may be over for France but Olise's bilingualism lessons live on.
Ahead of the France-Spain match earlier this week where Spain ultimately eliminated France, my algorithm was inundated with posts about France’s right winger Michael Olise, especially his much-debated fluency in French. (Also, his apparent “aloofness”, “nonchalantness”, “shyness”, pre-match pitch ritual and incredible style — there is a lot to unpack but I will stick to language although, all the fashion lovers here should definitely check out Olise’s fashion.)
In response to a post that showed Olise giving a wonderful slow and steady acceptance speech in French while the caption rudely said he was “struggling”, I did my own reel as a reminder that fluency is subjective, a continuum and not the same as dominance in a language. (I made the mistake of not crossing out the “struggling” in the original post so I received comments from people thinking I was the one criticising.) You can see the reel and hear Olise’s French here.
The post received some interesting, and unfortunately myth-perpetuating, comments. But as I say to my kids, this is a learning moment!
And here, a few other posts I came across. This time, I fixed the captions for this newsletter but you can see people love to judge and perpetuate deficit mindsets. Even googling the subject results in some dumb AI stuff.
To debunk all of this, I present:
