Does Your Body Parle Francais?

Laurence Wylie, 69, may be the only French-language teacher who starts his classes with a hard round of calisthenics. That tactic follows, with precise Gallic logic, from his basic premise: le franc,ais, in fact all language, is spoken mostly with the body. Says Wylie, a retired professor of French civilization at Harvard: "Just learning the rules of grammar and vocabulary isn't really enough."

So each day during the ten-week course, "Communicating with the French," Wylie's students limber up their English-speaking bodies with exercises. Then they scream and yell for a while to loosen their inhibitions. Finally, they study 30-second films of French students in conversation. The Indiana-born parson's son looks a little like that quintessential boulevardier Maurice Chevalier. He grudgingly admits that listening to the dialogue is useful, assurement, "but more important is analyzing the movement and the distance between bodies."

One of the first things that students learn is to keep the pelvis straight, as the French do. The French also hold their shoulders square but show greater flexibility with the lower arms, hands and wrists. Americans are stiff-wristed, tend to wiggle and bounce more than Mediterranean peoples. There is also a difference between Old and New Worlds in arm swinging: Americans do it as if they owned the world; Frenchmen walk with their upper arms close to the body, as if moving through very limited space.

In addition to linguistics, history and psychology, Wylie teaches his class dance therapy to help them pick up le rythme of French body language. "If you're off rhythm, it interferes with communications," he says. "I think of communication as a dance between two people. Sounds are often just the music to accompany the communication that takes place." That is why so many American tourists, fresh from Berlitz, get blank stares in France instead of directions: they understand the words but not the music.

Some of those musical riffs can be isolated as gestures, and Wylie teaches them all, many from his 1977 book Beaux Gestes. Pointing to the eye means "You can't fool me," and flicking the fingers across the cheek says "How dull," because the words for beard and razor (barbe, rasoir) have meant "boring" for more than a century. Pushing the nose upward means "It's so easy I could do it with my fingers up my nose." Drawing the tips of the fingers together and placing them in the palm of the other hand means "He's so lazy hair grows on his palms." The famous Gallic shrug with palms extended says "It doesn't worry me," but if the palms are raised chest high it becomes "What do you expect me to do about it?"

In America, if a man wants to signal his wife that it is time to leave a party, he is likely to tilt his head and roll his eyes in the direction of the door. In France, the signal is sharper: a chopping motion by one hand against the opposite wrist. Cupping the palms upward against the rib cage is a Frenchman's way of indicating that a woman is well endowed. The gesture is sometimes rendered as Il y a du monde au balcon, which translates as "There is a crowd in the balcony."

Wylie, who has studied at the Jacques Lecoq School for mimes in Paris, is convinced that most messages get across in elusive ways that defy rational analysis. When two strangers meet and get along well, he says, they may think it has something to do with "chemistry" or "vibes," but actually they are communicating rapidly and deeply on an unconscious level. That is why learning another language is like learning to act. The good language student, he says, "is one who is willing to pretend to be someone else."

Wylie thinks that Americans should try to decode some French body language on their next trip to Paris. Though the French have a reputation for haughtiness toward foreigners, Wylie disagrees: "They want to help you to approach civilization to the extent that that is possible." Bonne chance.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.