Teaching a language as French in Sweden gives rise to several challenges, far beyond only linguistic ones. As with any foreign language, one of the most important challenges is the culture aspects related to that language. Not only is the concept of culture problematic at a general level, but in the case of French, the fact that the language is used in different parts of the world adds a supplementary dimension. Indeed, it could be claimed that there are several cultures connected to the French language, and in a globalized world, it is an imperative to teach this diversity instead of only concentrating on continental France. This imperative has been theorized and promoted by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages in its support for the ”francophonie”, which is the term used for the whole community of speakers of French.

The premise of this article is that this cultural diversity inherent in the concept of the ”francophonie” is an opportunity rather than a problem, even in the cases when there are linguistic differences between the different variants of French used in different geographic locations. Such differences can be used, for example, to highlight the unstable nature of language in general, but they can especially be related to cultural and historical factors. Thus, language can be used as a tool to teach about cultural differences.

However, language per se is not enough to understand and teach the cultural diversity inherent in francophonie. Cultural products from different media are ways to discover this diversity, and the Swedish official syllabi for upper secondary school encourage this explicitly. Literature would be a privileged such medium, since francophonie has produced many important works, and even specific movements, during the last century. Unfortunately, these works are usually experienced as extremely difficult by the learners, so few teachers use them. In this paper I will give some examples on how an intermedial approach can be used in order to teach about some of these works from Québec, the French West Indies and French Africa.

Keywords: Francophonie, didactics of languages, cultural diversity, The French Indies.