One side effect of universal school purism is that subverting language rules has become something of a national pastime in France. And schools being the churches of purism, not surprisingly, that’s where the backlash begins. It didn’t take our girls more than a month to start parroting the schoolyard slang they heard during recess (and with two-hour lunch breaks, there was a lot of time for schoolyard French practice). They started by picking up the French accent and cadence, then quickly began truncating words and adding “o’s” to the end of them, just like their friends. They arrived home from school talking about the collo instead of the collation (snack). Everyone in France (except their parents) knew that a school principal, a directeur, is called a dirlo. Adolescents (teenagers) are ados. At Christmas, Nathalie declared she would henceforth be her sister’s “coiffeuse perso” (short for coiffeuse personnelle, meaning her sister’s personal hairdresser).
The truncation with the o is one of the most common techniques the French use today for generating new slang. But there are others, like altering the meaning of words by adding the endings -ant, -oche, -ouille, or –ard, or even combining these. These endings go back centuries in the history of popular French and argot. In 1980, the word branché (plugged) came to mean “informed, aware” and then “trendy.” A few years later, the term branchouille popped up, meaning trendy-ish, or hip, followed by branchouillard, which means the same thing but implies identity in a group (as in “hipsters”). Meanwhile, people who felt they had moved beyond branché developed a new term to describe themselves: câblé (being plugged into cable).
One of the modern-day argots in France is called Verlan, a process in which the syllables of a word are reversed. The word Verlan itself comes from envers (reverse) with the syllables reversed. So branché becomes chébran in Verlan, and and câblé became bléca. It’s similar to Cockney rhyming slang, or Thomas Jefferson’s pig Latin, with the distinction that everyone in France is acquainted with Verlan, which turned femme (woman) into meuf, fête (party) into teuf, and discret (discrete) into scred. Although Verlan was branché twenty years ago, it became somewhat institutionalized over the decades, and today the French hardly mention it because Verlan expressions have even become a sort of mainstream code used by all classes. Some words, like arabe (Arab), were verlanized twice: it produced beur in the late 1970s and was reverlanized into rebeu in the late 1990s.
The most popular French film of 2014 was a comedy called Qu’est-ce qu’on a fait au Bon Dieu? (What in God’s name did we do to deserve this?), about a provincial, traditional bourgeois Catholic couple whose xenophobic tendencies come to the surface when their four daughters take, in turn, a North African, Chinese, Jewish, and African husband. Verlan is used liberally throughout the film, which was targeted to a general audience: the Chinois (Chinese) is a noiche, the arabe is a rebeu, and the juif is a feuj. Audiences had absolutely no trouble understanding the jargon. In fact, part of the comic effect of the film came from the way the characters’ vocabulary clashed with the conservative milieu in which the story unfolded.
In a way the film was an allegory of the French relationship to their language: they are as firmly attached to tradition as they are open to change.
12
English Envy
We were in France for the seventieth anniversary of D-day, in June 2014. It was the third time we’d watched the French commemorate the Normandy landings, but it was the first time we heard them refer to it as le D-day, using the English term. The previous time, the French called it le Jour J, which is an exact translation. Jean-Benoît scoured French media databases to see when the switch to the English term had actually occurred. He found 2,900 articles published after 1999 with le D-day in the title, but only 900 before 2013. The English translation had taken over in 2014.
From our first days in France, we felt like we were in the middle of another kind of “landing.” English was everywhere: on billboards, in TV commercials, in storefront windows, in political slogans, protest posters—French cafés even advertised happy hour in English. The French capital is home to almost every international franchise on the planet, from Tie Rack and The Body Shop to Starbucks, so English has been part of the Parisian landscape for decades.
But what we witnessed went beyond major brand names. Our apartment was in the Latin Quarter, virtually the world headquarters of French, and yet someone had opened near the Luxembourg Gardens an outlet of a British chain called Eat Well: Bagels, Cookies and More. The French were even giving their homegrown businesses English names. A clothes store in Paris’s Marais neighborhood called Kulte advertised itself as “The French Brand.” The streets were full of stores with English-French hybrid names, like the lingerie shop Woman Secret, which advertised “Sexy Daily” sales in its window. English was even creeping into places where it had no business we could imagine. Paris’s Palais des Beaux-Arts held an exhibition on international cuisine and called it Cookbook, l’art et le processus culinaire (Cookbook, culinary art and process). We couldn’t believe our eyes.
The phenomenon wasn’t limited to Paris. We spent a weekend in the southern department of the Landes, which shares a border with Spain and whose economy runs on tourism and lumber. Two lumber shops in one village we visited were called, respectively, Gascogne Wood Products and All Wood. Later, Jean-Benoît went to a literary event in the town of Bourges, in central France, at a bookstore called Cultura, and discovered the store’s catalogue was called Creativ by Cultura, in English, even though it only listed French books being sold to French people.
Talking to the French we had the impression that the whole country had come down with a serious case of English envy. The French were either open to English or fatalistic about it—it was hard to tell the difference given the French knack for putting a negative spin on good news. Whatever the case, there had been a conspicuous shift in attitudes. Our friend François Digonnet informed us that he thought English was “liberating.” This was startling, since ten years ago, this French anarchist (who actually doesn’t speak English) routinely recited anti-American rants like the rest of the French Left, and he still claimed he wouldn’t travel in the United States on principle. Judging by François’s rhetoric, English was no longer part of the package of what the French used to roundly consider American cultural imperialism. In fact, it had freed itself from the stigma of being American altogether. François said he liked the côté rebelle (rebellious side) of English.
And that’s when we first understood that in France, English is a new argot. It has become a jargon that people use to flout the wordy precision of French purism. “Things in English are shorter, more concise,” François concluded. “Fuck just says everything, don’t you think?” We weren’t sure what to say.
At our daughters’ school in Paris, parents couldn’t get enough of English, though for different reasons than François’s. At the first parent-teacher meetings for both our daughters’ classes, English instruction turned out to be parents’ next big concern after the oral exposés. Parents’ attitudes, again, were a strange mix of enthusiasm and defeatism. “You can’t get a job without English,” one parent whispered during the meeting. In Erika’s class, no fewer than four parents asked how much English would be taught that year. Madame Letendre reassured parents—four times—that there would be an English class, taught by a special instructor, to be announced. “My accent is too strong,” she said apologetically. In the classroom next door, Nathalie’s teacher turned out to be the only qualified English instructor in the school. He promised parents he would go beyond basics and actually use English regularly in his class (and he actually did). He had already identified the three English-speaking pupils in the class and conscripted them for tutor duty.
The sense of urgency about learning English is new in France, but English isn’t. Word borrowings are part of the normal life of any language. Foreign words come (and go) in any language as countries or cultures gain (then lose) international stature in a specific area. French is no exception. It st
arted absorbing English words in the seventeenth century, and that was after it dipped enthusiastically into Italian (French acquired two thousand Italian borrowings over the course of the Renaissance), Spanish, and German. English borrowings picked up over the eighteenth century with the popularity of British Enlightenment thinkers, then again at the beginning of the twentieth century when the United States became a dominating force in science, business, and diplomacy. (Borrowings, of course, go both ways: between 30 percent and 50 percent of basic English comes from French, though that is a much older story).1
Some English borrowings have become thoroughly French with time. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the French developed a soft spot for the English ending -ing, which they pronounce something like “eenyna.” It’s common to hear the French refer to un happening, le planning, or le meeting, which have roughly the same meaning as in English. But the French also apply the –ing to words, either English or French, to create expressions that only make sense to the French, like pressing (dry cleaner), footing (walking as an exercise activity), and even now séjourning (renting a furnished home). (It sounds a bit silly to English speakers, but English speakers do the same with the French suffix –ette, creating words that sound equally ludicrous to French ears, like “launderette,” “luncheonette,” “kitchenette,” or “suffragette.”)
There are of course plenty of voices in France protesting l’assaut de l’anglais (the English onslaught). But professional estimates of the situation don’t actually support alarmist outcries. As it turns out, it is quite difficult to quantify the presence of English words in France, or compare it to past situations to establish a trend, let alone evaluate the impact of English on the French language itself.2 At a symposium on English in the media held at the Collège de France, the French linguist Bernard Cerquiglini said, “We notice borrowings like moles on a face, but we don’t notice when they disappear, which is the case for the vast majority of them.” His point of view is important. Cerquiglini is one of the few French who have tried to scientifically study the impact of English on their language by looking at the number of borrowed English words in the French press. He has long argued that the actual impact of English on French is minor, and according to his study, 1 in 170 words in a newspaper (he chose Le Monde) is a borrowing.
Other borrowings stick, but then take on a different meaning in French, or become so thoroughly assimilated into the French lexicon that they are no longer recognizable as English. The verb “to clash” is used in French in sentences like Ma mère m’a clashé (My mother clashed me), meaning, “my mother scolded me and we clashed,” a pretty big semantic leap. Even more amusing is the case of les pipoles (celebrities). The term comes from the name of People magazine, although there never was a French franchise of the weekly. In French media jargon, un pipole is a star that plays the public celebrity game. The word is now enjoying a great career of its own, spawning weird neologisms like the verb pipoliser (to Peoplize) and the noun pipolisation (the process by which things are being Peoplized), and the adjective pipolisable (the degree to which a candidate is People-able). Ironically, the English word “people” comes from old French (pople, now peuple)—the study of anglicisms is full of such historical ironies.3
While researching a story on English in France, Julie visited France’s Délégation générale à la langue française et aux langues de France (DGLFLF), the closest thing the French actually have to a “language police,” to see what they thought about the English onslaught. The DGLFLF is an agency of the French government but relies mostly on volunteer efforts. At the time of writing, it coordinated and compiled the work of seventeen separate committees, composed of twenty or thirty volunteer members each, who monitor their own professional field and then report back on English or other foreign words creeping into French vocabulary. The organization then comes up with equivalents for these words, or finds already existing French ones, which they often get from Quebec. After the new terminology is accepted specific professional and governmental sectors are required to use it, but not, obviously, the French public at large.
Bénédicte Madinier, senior director at the DGLFLF, claimed she wasn’t losing much sleep over the English problem. “The French adore using English,” she said. Although the government doesn’t actually keep statistics on it, in the last ten years, she explained, English was being used much more, particularly in business and the financial sectors, in technology industries and on the Internet. Madinier thought that there was much more English in French publicity, and that this was creeping into daily use. “We used to say rouge à lèvres; now we say lipstick.” On the other hand, she said, English words have been used in French for many years and have become more or less implanted in French. She cited examples like un sandwich, un steak, un club, le football, un clown, le dumping, le cockpit, un show. “They’re French now,” she said.4
A conversation about anglicisms between a French person and a Quebecker can quickly degenerate into a blizzard of accusations. That’s mostly because the two people don’t incorporate English into their speech the same way. When they talk about parking, for instance, French people will say: je me gare au parking, while the Quebeckers will say je me parque au stationnement. But it’s also due to the fact that the two societies have almost completely different relationships to the English language itself. Because of the enormous presence of English in Quebec (there are almost a million native Anglophones in a population of 8 million, not to mention over 300 million English speakers surrounding Quebec on every side), Quebeckers have created language laws that limit the use of English and affirm the place of French in public. Unlike in Quebec, French companies and institutions tend to flash English in public to show they are modern. English is less visible in Quebec, but far more present in day-to-day conversation than it is in France.
It’s fair to say the French are obsessed with their language. But contrary to what most of the outside world believes, the French are not especially concerned about English as a threat to the survival of the French language. At worst, they think French is becoming “less relevant,” though in French minds, this is bad enough. In the spring of 2013, France’s minister of higher education and research, Geneviève Fioraso, introduced measures in the hope of improving France’s universities. One of the proposals was to officially allow universities to teach a limited number of courses in a foreign language—which of course meant English. The New York Times reported on a “swift and fierce” reaction to the law. In fact, opponents were mostly a case of “the usual suspects.” They were familiar voices with predictable objections. (Contrary to Quebeckers who study the matter carefully, French authorities do not seek to understand the opinion of the majority of French regarding English.) The French Academy accused the French government of “marginalizing” French; the renowned French linguist Claude Hagège, a longtime critic of English, declared that the French government was “setting a bad example.” The controversy was intense, but the French government went ahead and passed the law; French universities had been teaching some courses in English for years anyway.5
Discussions in foreign media about English in France invariably veer to the topic of the so-called language police, the French Academy. It’s worth underlining: the French don’t have a language police, or anything close to it. At best, they have something like unarmed vigilantes. Unlike Quebec, France doesn’t have a specific law that limits, let alone prohibits, English. Aside from the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts—the law passed in 1539 declaring French the exclusive language of the French administration—the only legislation the French have ever passed to protect their language is the 1994 Loi Toubon. It states that official government business in France must be carried out in French and that French companies must communicate to the French public in a way that is understandable to them. The same year, France’s Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional to actually forbid English, on grounds that it violates freedom of expression. (By comparison, Quebec’s legislature ruled that cer
tain limits on freedom of expression are acceptable in the name of protecting a common good, the French language. Canada’s Supreme Court agreed.)6
It’s important to understand what the French Academy does, and doesn’t, do. All societies have a body of some type, whether an “office,” an “academy,” or an “institute,” that establishes standards for the official language and develops policies to promote it. This is true of small languages like Catalan and Hebrew, and big languages like Spanish, which has twenty-two separate academies, one for each Spanish-speaking country (and two in the United States, in Puerto Rico and New York City). Many, if not most, were modeled on the French Academy, and some do a much better job of promoting and protecting their language.
Contrary to an almost universal belief, the French Academy doesn’t do anything to eradicate English creeping into French, at least not where mainstream vocabulary is concerned.7 None of its pronouncements have ever had the force of law. The Academy mostly rubber-stamps the proposals the DGLFLF makes for French equivalents to English terms (the recommendations of the DGLFLF concern mostly language used in the French administration and other professional domains). Approved words are not forced either on the media or schools or society—there’s no legal way for the French state to do that anyway. Furthermore, regular French folk often have a good laugh when they hear about new words the French Academy has “approved” in the news.
The real particularity of the French language isn’t the Academy, but the strong culture of purism in France. This purism both helps stave off English, and, perversely, encourages its use. Purism, or its effects, is one reason the French welcome English words into the country. The French reflexively call English “simple.” Few of them actually know enough about the language to make an educated assessment of its complexity, and many would be surprised at how difficult English spelling can actually be. But the French aren’t talking about the English language as much as they are talking about the culture that goes with it, which does tend to value simplicity.
The Bonjour Effect Page 16
