The language of change in Cambodia

Visakha Houl adores her job. She spends her days among Voltaire, Molière, and copies of Le Monde, the French daily.

The only problem with working at the French Cultural Center library is that Ms. Houl has a bit too much time to herself: Few young people here seem interested in learning what was once la langue de rigueur for Cambodians.

That includes her son. Houl helps him scrape together tuition of $450 a year - about 40 times the monthly salary of teachers and government workers - so he can study management in English at a private college here.

"English is the first language of the world now," she says, with a dab of nostalgia.

Students attending classes at the French Cultural Center or at government-run schools pay only half to a quarter of the going rate in private schools. But the classes are subsidized by Cambodia's former colonial power, France, which requires that all instruction - from medicine to law - be in French.

Indeed, the French are pushing for something of a cultural comeback nearly a half century since France - then engrossed in a war against communists in Vietnam - granted its rebellious colony independence.

As colonizers, the French brought a certain level of education and development; Cambodians, however, were looked down upon, and most important jobs that were not reserved for French officials were given to Vietnamese.

"The French are working very hard on this," says Prach Sim, editor and publisher of The Popular Magazine. "They remember the Indochina of 100 years ago, and so they are establishing things like the French Cultural Center [which opened a decade ago] and giving money to students to study in France."

Although appreciative of France's aid, many here feel that the insistence on French is a little impractical in an age when the argot of economic recovery is English. "Most young people today are studying English, because with English, they know it's easier to find a good job," Prach Sim adds.

When the brutal Khmer Rouge regime engulfed Cambodia between 1975 and 1979, it virtually wiped out formal education and tried to expunge all forms of foreign influence. Though Cambodia's self-styled "liberators" resented French colonial control, many had picked up their communist revolutionary ideas while studying in 1960s Paris. Their failed attempt to create a Marxist-style agrarian utopia resulted in the deaths of some 1.7 million Cambodians.

Today, Cambodia is struggling to emerge from that dark period and the crippling poverty of its aftermath. It dearly hopes to enter the World Trade Organization. But as Cambodians look for trading partners among their neighbors in ASEAN - the Association of Southeast Asian Nations - they find that the only common language is English.

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