Paris:- Wednesday, 29. January 1997:- As a poor student of languages, I should have no reason to go to a language exposition; especially living in a country where I can't correctly pronounce more than, say, five percent of the words I commonly use.

All the same, as favor to a colleague, I have hauled myself all the way out to the métro station Porte de Pantin again, to see what goes on at the Salon called 'Expolangues.' Also, it is in the 'Grande Halle,' which I saw a week ago for the first time while at the new "Musée de la Musique".

When I see light again, it is grey, but the lion fountain at Villette is gushing water and 'Expolangues' is in red neon on the front of the great shed-like building.

Inside I do the usual trip through the press office and I get an unusually slim folder, but I have to ask for a name-badge because they are not plastering all and sundry with them automatically. Wearing a name badge with journalist on it has the advantage of warning people not to say things they shouldn't; but I don't think anybody ever reads them because I am always being told things I can't use - like gossip and embarrassing inside information. Maybe people think 'journalists' are priests?

The babble starts right outside the press office. Most of the interior of the very large hall, is full of little cubicles like a rabbit-hutch, and different languages are coming out of every one of them. There are about twice as many exhibitors as there are countries in the world.

My colleague is supposed to be in the centre someplace and I go down an alley with German on the left, Greek on the right, past Spanish and Portuguese, until I see a 'Cyber'-something sign and I go around this sunken pit to the other side to get closer to the sign, and all I find is Canada.

If you have a globe of the world handy, Canada is not hard to find, and it seems to take up about the same amount of space here. Canada is the invited 'Country of Honor.'

Expositions and salons in Paris often have countries of honor and often they add an interesting element, because you can learn quite a bit about a place - all sorts of things that haven't necessarily much to do with the subject of the show.

In case you don't know, I should point out that Canada is an officially bilingual country. It is unofficially bilingual too - all breakfast cereal boxes are in French and English, so you can have language lessons before you are fully awake - like I do by trying to listen to radio 'France Info' in semi-consciousness before I have my shower in the morning, and afterwards while tying my shoelaces.

The anti-terrorist 'Vigipirate' - now there's a catchy name! - is still in operation in Paris, but I'm not sure this is the reason the Canadians have brought a whole squad of Royal Canadian Mounted Police with them.

I am also surprised that the 'Mounties' are still 'Royal,' but I forget to ask Sergeant Jim Rainville why it is so. I also forget to ask him if they have brought their horses, which is really dumb because I saw them years ago with horses and lances in the Rathausplatz in Hamburg.

Sergeant Rainville is from Ottawa and is currently - when he is not in Paris - a career counsellor in the recruitment business. He told me he got this Paris command because he used to lead RCMP troopers to Montréal for language training.

The fellow on the right in the photo is not a 'Mountie.' He is Mr. Claude St-Onge and he lives in Edmonton, but is from Québec. Claude is at Expolangues doing quickie cartoon portraits and is doing a good business with it - or would be if he didn't talk so much to his subjects - to the mild annoyance of those waiting their turn.

While waiting to ask him if he had a French work permit I have an interesting conversation with one of his future clients - whose name I'm sorry I didn't get - who has been teaching in France for the past four months since arriving from Portugal.

He tells me about this great weekend shopping place that everybody in central Portugal goes to, just over the border in Spain. I didn't get its name either, but it could be Fuentes de Oñoro or Ciudad Rodrigo, on the E3 to Salamanca, where there is the great Plaza Mayor.

As I wander around the maze of stands and booths it becomes apparent that the 'business' here is mainly about getting people to sign up for language courses, and if they can be talked into taking them in Australia, so much the better. The Canadians have so many stands I almost think it must be the country's principal activity - which it may be if two-thirds of the population are learning French and the other third are learning English.

According to the Salon's 'facts for the press,' 800 million people in the world speak English and 116 million speak French. A brochure I have picked up from the European Community stands says there are 360 million English speakers worldwide, and 100 million French - which seems to me to be about the same ratio as in Canada.

The Euro brochure also says English and French speakers together are outnumbered by Mandarin speakers by a wide margin, although English is a distant second after it. It does not say that a lot of Mandarin speakers are moving to Canada these days; although I have heard recently that this immigration has stopped, but do not know why. Maybe Mandarin speakers are moving to Paris now?

Here at Expolangues there is a potpourri of languages. (Now I use my Liris/Larousse CD-ROM dictionary on 'potpourri' and it gives me 'fleurs séchées' in French. Checking 'pot-pourri' in French gives me 'potpourri' in English. This is not sufficient for language-geeks, so I haul out my heavy-duty word guide and it says the French pot-pourri comes from the Spanish 'olla podrida,' and 'pot' comes from old French and 'pourri' means rotten, or the past participle of it. This in turn comes from vulgar Latin, but is unattested; but is attested from a variant of Latin, and it still means, rotten. I am using it in the sense, not of 'rotten,' but as 'a combination of various incongruous elements' - as in 'babble.')

The European Union with its 15 countries is pushing languages at the expo because the community has a surplus of them - 11 in all. Yet the very nature of the community means that bi- or multilingualism is not a mere whim on the part individuals, but a integral part of EU planning and policy.

The EU says that 80 percent of the world's information that is in digital storage, is in English - and this gives, in the community at least, an unfair advantage to native English speakers and others who have learned it.

Simply put, there will never be enough lessons or live translators to go around - machines will have to handle the bulk of the load. By 'machines,' I mean microprocessors and software - or as software is called in French, 'logiciels.' For the EU, language tools are a target sector of technology and development, and are becoming a very big business as a result.

As we all know there are technophobes among us. For them the Esperanto people have a solution, and it is still called 'Esperanto.' My sister learned this and kept up a correspondence in it for some years; and it is represented at the salon

I am pleased to see the French are taking nothing for granted and the Ministry of Culture's stand is next to the Europeans. French is the official language of France and I think everybody is pretty much aware of this historic fact.

However, the press information I have contains a list of other lesser-used languages in France, and they include Alsatian-German, Breton, Basque, Corsican, Catalan, Moselle-French, Dutch, Provençal, 'le sept parlers du domaine d'Oïl,' and Creole.

Around Paris, one hears a lot of English all the time; but it is not officially recognized regardless of how much of it is broadcast by radio and TV, and spoken by waiters, taxi drivers, employees of the Paris Tourist Office and occasionally, by the President of the Republic (but only when he is on foreign visits to Anglo-Saxon countries).

According to Professor Henriette Walter of the University of Rennes, modern French is composed largely of old Latin and imported German-Latin. In the Middle Ages several regional dialects, or patois were spoken, but in the end - and fairly recently at that - it was the Parisian version which gained supremacy as a national language.

Today the uniformity of French is defended by l'Académie française, which has a big job on its hands as languages are slippery things that do not respect political lines drawn on maps. Satellite broadcasts of TV programs and the English-overweight Internet are giving the academy a big headache.

It matters not a fake ten-franc piece that French scientists were largely the authors of the section of Internet that you know as the Web; the very thing you are using to read this piece.

[If Metropole had the resources, it would be available in German, Spanish, Italian and Japanese as well as English. And of course, in French too - mainly for French speakers residing outside of France. I don't think the citizens of France need Paris 'explained' to them by Metropole; Paris is a very large topic adequately covered by national publications. However, if the European community has 'tools' for helping Metropole become as multilingual as it should be - then I intend to find out about them.]

Metropole's busy correspondent in Japan, Makiko Suzuki, once wrote that she learned more about Japanese culture while studying French at the Sorbonne than she had learned in school in Japan. I noticed this too while taking French at the Alliance Française - all sorts of tiddly bits of English I used unconsciously - had French equivalents and they had names I re-learned.

If you have the time to learn a foreign language, you will probably end up learning quite a bit about the foreign culture as well, and have a refresher for your own language - and believe me, in today's world, this kind of acquired knowledge is not useless.

These thoughts have been altogether too serious to adequately describe what is actually going on today at Expolangues. In the big hall here, a lot of people are talking - a lot of different languages - to learn things. They are also doing it for fun.

I have already said I am more or less a 'failure' with languages - partly because I think in images - but in practise, after weeks of thinking and talking in French and English, after initial hesitation, when my German 'memory' kicks in, hey! this is fun - thinking and talking in another thought process. After 30 minutes of it, I have refound 4,000 words I don't normally use on a day-to-day basis. They were not lost at all, just a little dusty from being 'on the shelf.'

On the way out, loaded down with the usual ton of printed paper, I pass a Russian stand. The lady customer is saying, "Isn't this 'Tintin' in two parts?" The lady working the stand shuffles through the dozen Tintin albums with Cyrillic titles, and turns up the missing 'part two,' which has a cover drawing with no relation to the cover on part one. The customer happily buys the two albums.

Outside it is near dusk and I turn back and look at the 'Grande Halle' of babble. The neon signs are very red, the inside light is gentle and under the roof, people are talking - languages.