The Bonjour Effect

by Barlow, Julie

  Among French speakers, the release of a new edition of any dictionary is an event amply covered by the press, which then turns the event into a topic of conversation. French dictionaries share one feature with French wine: both industries are built on strong local consumption. Larousse and Robert became international references in the dictionary business (and not just in French, but in English, German, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, and Chinese) because the French themselves buy so many dictionaries, creating a solid base for companies so they can expand. The Paris Book Fair (le Salon du livre) has two Journées des dictionnaires (Dictionary Days), when dozens of lexicographers present their new work. The dictionary sensation at the 2014 Salon was Le dico des mots qui n’existent pas, mais qu’on utilise quand même (The dictionary of words that don’t exist but that we use anyway). In this genre, nothing is too specific.

  Words constantly make the news in France: literary newspapers, like the Paris daily Libération, even cover the appearance of new words entering the French lexicon like current events stories. Shortly after we arrived in France 2013, there was a story in the news about a jeweler in the southern French city of Nice who had shot a thief in the back. It was widely covered and stayed in the news because a Facebook page, created to support the jeweler, got a surprising 1.6 million “Likes” in less than a day. Libération ran as many stories scrutinizing the meaning and significance of a Facebook “Like” as it did on the actual event.

  French TV and newspaper interviewers often wrap up by asking their guests what their favorite word is. To the French, word choices are revealing both of someone’s character and of their ability to use the French language to its fullest potential. When asked what his favorite word was, the actor Fabrice Lucchini, known for being irreverent, answered archly, “croquis” (sketch), apparently because he liked the way it sounded. The actress Fanny Ardant answered, “tant pis!” (too bad) to show her insouciant side. The filmmaker Louis Malle answered “bonheur” (happiness); the actress Brigitte Bardot said “harmonie” (harmony); the actress Isabelle Adjani chose lumière (light); and Salmon Rushdie, métamorphose (metamorphosis).

  French newspapers frequently use a single, often enigmatic word as a title to catch readers’ interest. In February 2014, following a week of protests against same-sex marriage in France, Libération ran an editorial denouncing the lack of reaction by the government. The title was simply “Aboulie,” a word that means an absence of willpower. In profiles of French personalities, French journalists expand on their encounter by branching off to examine a new term. In a profile of the actor Guillaume Gallienne, when he was playing the character of Oblomov in a play inspired by the 1859 novel by the Russian writer Ivan Goncharov, a journalist devoted part of the article to exploring the meaning of the word oblomovisme (a kind of slothflul laziness). It was a strange angle for an article about a hyperactive actor like Gallienne, who has starred in forty plays and twenty-seven films over the last twenty years, but the word was evidently just too interesting to leave alone.2

  For outsiders to French culture, language is among the easiest topics to talk about with the French, on par with geography, food, and culture. The French are usually willing and eager to immerse foreigners in the minutiae of French grammar rules, etymology, and spelling, and they enjoy comparing languages. The discussions often have a barely concealed tone of proselytization. The French want to educate and enlighten us. They think their language is fascinating and they assume we do, too.

  In addition to their fascination with words, the French love picking apart other people’s language use. For all their love of nuance, when it comes to language standards, the French are curiously binary. Language use, in their minds, is either good or it’s bad; it conforms to the norm or it doesn’t. They like to think there is a right and a wrong. It’s one reason they constantly correct each other. It’s an old cultural reflex tied to the doctrine of language purism, which was first formulated by the French poet François de Malherbe (1555–1628) at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Like many of his contemporaries, Malherbe was motivated by a desire to make a break with the previous century in France, marked by the wars of religion, atrocious massacres, and civil war. Malherbe was an influential poet and took it upon himself to “clean” French of what he considered filth, including archaic terms, regional terms, synonyms, and technical terms. His idea was to make French into a concise, clear, and coherent language. Malherbe’s ideas struck a chord in France’s circles of power and one of Malherbe’s followers, King Louis XIII’s chief minister, Cardinal Richelieu, would go on to create the French Academy largely based on Malherbe’s ideas. In the meantime, French scholars started producing grammars and dictionaries. French salons saw the arrival of figures known as remarqueurs or remarquistes, whose remarks and pronouncements on language were considered authoritative.3

  Modern France still has remarqueurs in the form of linguists and language experts whose comments frequently appear in the press. But even if the French media dutifully report on the election of new members to the French Academy, they pay little attention to what the Academy is actually doing. This is particularly hard for foreigners to grasp. Like Perrier, Roquefort, and bordeaux wine, the French Academy is an international brand recognized across the world. But as conversation topics go, no one has much to say about it. The French Academy is more symbolic than significant. It doesn’t really do anything but hand out second-tier literary prizes and rubber-stamp the work of actual professional lexicographers (which Academy members are not). Foreigners typically attribute to the French Academy more influence than it has, and certainly more than it deserves. Nor does the French Academy “rule” over language. Its pronouncements, which are rare, hold no legal weight and rarely any influence. In short, no one in France has much to say about it because there isn’t much to say. (Though if the French understood how heartily the outside world believes in the importance of their Academy, that would make an interesting topic of conversation. The French would be all over it.)4

  It’s another French institution that really carries the torch of language purism: the schools. French teachers have been shouldering most of the responsibility of preserving French for the last two centuries. Many French have forgotten this, but two centuries ago, most of France was not French speaking. As Graham Robb writes in The Discovery of France, “The process of forgetting was one of the great social forces in the formation of modern France. Middle-class children would forget the provincial languages they learned from nurses and servants, or remember them only as a picturesque remnant of the past.” And he adds, “In the land of a thousand tongues, monolingualism became the mark of the educated person.” But turning French into the language of the land was not an easy task. The legacy of this uphill battle explains, at least partly, why the French remain so firmly convinced that their language is such a difficult one to master. It’s also why they are so adamant about children learning it properly and thoroughly.

  Language is a matter of national identity in France. In fact, language is so deeply embedded in the French national identity the French don’t seem to even consider French as a language among others. French children are theoretically supposed to learn two or three foreign languages by the time they finish le lycée (high school). The process starts in grade 6, where kids become acquainted with a second language (usually English or German). Then in grade 8, they are introduced to a third language (the choices are generally English, German, and Spanish). And when they start le lycée (grade 10), students have to choose yet another language (from a wider selection that may include Arabic, Italian, or one of France’s regional languages). But curiously, regardless of what language kids choose, the French don’t call it a “second” language but a “first” language, une première langue. The one after that is the second, la deuxième langue (second language), even if it comes third.

  In other words, as far as the French are concerned, French is not a mere language. It’s part of what it means to be French. Learning the French langu
age properly is considered a duty in France. That’s one reason language teaching in French schools is so rigorously structured. By the time French children are nine, as we learned, they are expected to demonstrate proper spelling skills and even penmanship.

  Language is a key tool of social promotion in France, in virtually any professional domain. Bad French will get you nowhere in France. Good French opens doors that might not have opened otherwise. French teachers and parents aren’t worried that telling children they are wrong might damage their self-esteem. All the mistakes our girls made in their written work were flagged and corrected—and not just in the dictées and grammar exercises, but in all their work. No written faute goes without censure in France, even if students aren’t actually penalized for it. In elementary school the general philosophy is not very punitive, but that changes as kids get older. The really severe marking kicks in during collège (roughly grades 6–9) and lycée (grades 10–12), where 10 out of 20, or 12 out of 20 is considered a good grade. Students who commit numerous fautes can end up with marks of minus 10, 15, or even 20.

  We already touched on why the fear of faute makes the French deflect responsibility for even the most mundane oversights. School performance in France is fueled by the fear of committing fautes. The fixation on fautes even got so out of hand in France that the government tried to ban the term faute, itself, in 2007. Teachers cannot, technically, refer to errors as fautes today. But it’s not easy to erase age-old teaching (and parenting) mentalities. The philosophy of the faute remains firmly anchored in the French psyche. It has been at the heart of French teaching for centuries. In 2014, France’s education minister passed a reform that would require teachers to reward students for improvement, as opposed to penalizing them for shortcomings. But to this day, a child who reduces his dictée “errors” from 40 to 20 still gets zero over 20, or less.

  It will be difficult—likely impossible—to completely revolutionize French faute-based teaching techniques, mostly because the French hold their language up to an imaginary mirror of perfection. In this “ideal” French, spelling, diction, and grammar conform to strict rules—some real, some imaginary. No one, of course, writes this “perfect” French in real life. But the idea still has a hold on the French: almost everyone strives to reach it in some way or another.

  The same ideals, unrealistic as they are, even apply to spoken French, which is supposed to mirror the written standard. Ideal spoken French is supposed to be perfectly precise. So there should be no approximations (and definitely no mumbling). According to the ideal, every word uttered counts, and each one should convey an exact meaning. Basically, ideal spoken French is school French—and since all public schools in France follow the same curriculum, the language they produce is remarkably uniform from one end of the country to the other (and even across oceans, to France’s overseas territories). Local inflections and vocabulary are supposed to disappear in this French, which should sound more or less like you are reading a book. Of course, few people actually speak this “ideal” French, even in formal situations, but in typical French fashion, that doesn’t erase the expectation that everyone should speak it.

  The other places we have lived, besides Paris—Montreal, Toronto, and Phoenix, Arizona—all shared a high tolerance for poor language use (though of course, we only know that because we lived in a place that doesn’t tolerate poor language skills). It is common in North American restaurants, stores, or taxis to be served by people who don’t speak the greatest English, and it’s tolerated. While it happens in France—there are people who slip through the cracks—a visitor is unlikely to meet people who speak French poorly to them. It’s not because there aren’t any. French society just hides them in back store jobs; they never serve customers, largely because the French themselves have little or no tolerance for bad French.

  Nor do the French have the slightest qualms about passing judgment on how others speak. As a matter of fact, they often end up talking about language when they want to criticize something totally unrelated. Language is an easy shield for other less acceptable prejudices. The French use language to editorialize on all sorts of things that politeness or political correctness would normally forbid. It’s a common way they criticize les jeunes, youth (who supposedly can’t speak properly anymore), or immigrants (they refuse to learn French), or technology (it’s eroding the French language), or class differences.

  In fact, picking on someone’s language is an acceptable way of bad-mouthing or mocking them, even if the real complaint has nothing to do with language. Jean-Benoît witnessed this dynamic one afternoon at a café on avenue Montaigne, in Paris’s swish eighth arrondissement. He was interviewing the director of a drone flight-test center near Bordeaux for a story on France’s civilian drone industry. (The French are world leaders in developing civilian uses for unmanned aerial vehicles, mostly because the French government opened its own skies to civilian drones earlier than most other countries did, including Canada and the United States.) Throughout the interview, the director, a chain smoker, tapped his cigarette ashes on the ground below the table, unaware that the wind was picking the ashes up and depositing them in the pant cuffs of a neatly dressed older gentleman at the next table. At one point the gentleman in question turned to the director and told him to stop flicking ashes on him. He either forgot or ignored him and continued tapping his ashes until the gentleman turned around a second time and snapped: “Mais quel malotrus!” (What a lout you are!) The gentleman was asserting his class status, but knowing that using class was an outmoded way to belittle people and hearing that the director, who is from Bordeaux, had a slight southern accent, he turned to language instead: “Vous parlez français?” (Do you even speak French?) It was the ultimate insult.

  When it comes to the French and their language, the Anglo-American media seem convinced that the French are obsessed with protecting their language from outside threats. But what worries most French are the threats from the inside. We had lunch with a friend, Sophie Maura, a lawyer in Essonne, a department just southwest of Paris. As her name suggests, she is of Spanish descent. Her father was a Spanish petroleum engineer from Burgos who immigrated to France and spent most of his life working north of the city of Pau, in the French Pyrenees. We were amazed by her assessment of her father’s experience as a hard-working immigrant: “I don’t understand how he got through his life speaking such horrible French!” She was being perfectly candid. She really was puzzled, but mostly embarrassed for him.

  But it would be a caricature to present the whole population of France as dyed-in-the-wool language purists. Despite the norms and standards that form the bedrock of French purism and that justify the custom of correcting incessantly, day-to-day French are constantly shifting and everyone knows it. Conservative circles constantly bemoan changing standards in phonetics, grammar, and vocabulary, citing them as evidence of the “decadence” of French. Progressive circles celebrate the French language’s power of invention. Most of the French are on the fence about the issue. But everyone knows that real-life French is not the same thing as school French. People never speak like books or walking dictionaries.5

  All French go through the purist drill at school. But when they grow up, most become the linguistic equivalent of regular churchgoers, not religious zealots. Many words one hears in France are not in any French dictionary. In any language, even French, speech is much freer than writing. And in a purist culture like the one surrounding French, the spoken language operates as a pressure valve, allowing speakers to occasionally turn their noses up at the purist ideology they have to respect in their day jobs. In other words, as in any case of extremism, French language purism just begs for a backlash. For all their purist posturing, the French love to lapse, and relish the rebellious side of their language.

  Needless to say, true French, the language that comes out of the mouths of millions of French people every day, is much more truncated, and less tidy, than school French. Fifteen years ago, people started speaking o
f résa, for ticket reservations. Today it’s so common that you see résa followed by a phone number or an e-mail address in ads for any performance. Journalists, the chroniclers of day-to-day language, are great popularizers of new expressions. The French daily Le Parisien had no compunction about using the term niaque (from the Gascon word gnaca, meaning to bite) in its headlines to describe a particularly combative political candidate.

  One of the best places to see how French is changing is in the world of texting. Most of what is written there is a transcription of real speech, not school speech. Jean-Benoît ran across a fascinating sample of this French when he went searching online for a good hamburger restaurant in Paris, hamburgers being among the few dishes the French are far from mastering. The sentence he found was: “Je bosse rue de Bercy, j’ai grave la dalle, et je me mangerai bien un hamburger” (I work on De Bercy street. I’m starving. I would really like a hamburger right now), but almost all in French slang). Although a teacher would mark seven mistakes in the seventeen words (for the sake of cross-cultural clarity, we removed the spelling and conjugation errors), nobody in France would pretend they didn’t understand it. Bosser is popular slang for “to work,” but means something more like “to slog.” You could never find J’ai grave la dalle (I’m starving) in a dictionary. Normally, grave is slang for “serious,” but it is also used colloquially as an adverb in the sense of “very.” Avoir la dalle can mean being either thirsty or hungry, depending on the context. While je me mangerais un hamburger (I would really like a hamburger right now) is a faulty pronominal use of the verb manger (to eat), it is a common speech pattern in the Southwest of France, probably from the influence of nearby Spain. (Reflexive verbs are very common in Spanish.)