Has France Surrendered to Anglicisms?
How the country’s fierce linguistic resistance ultimately gave in to the Internet.
In the mid-nineties, when I was 14, I pitched in the French national baseball finals. This was not as impressive as it sounds. Baseball came to France around the same time as basketball, in the early twentieth century, but never had the same success. Most of my teammates were either American expats or French kids who couldn’t cut it at soccer and were too uncoordinated for the next–most popular team sports. And yet, our league insisted that we use French baseball terminology. A strike was a prise. A home run was a coup de circuit. The knuckleball actually improved in translation: balle papillon—or “butterfly ball.” Not that anybody could throw one.
Our baseball lexicon was derived from the militantly francophone province of Quebec. At that time, the right-wing French government was promoting its own agenda of linguistic protectionism, which extended to the private sector and even, evidently, to the American pastime. Jacques Toubon, the minister of culture and francophonie (a position that no longer exists as such), passed a series of laws designed to combat the gradual anglicizing of the French language. The ministry released an approved list of unwieldy Gallic alternatives for widely used English phrases like “weekend” (fin de semaine) and “email” (courriel). On the cultural front, radio stations were to play French songs at least 40% of the time during waking hours.
But that opposition stood about as strong as Agincourt against the invasion of English. Actually, the Maginot Line is a better military metaphor, since the battlements of Francophonia weren’t so much breached as circumvented, via the Internet. Today, English phrases and neologisms are no sooner posted to Urban Dictionary than they appear in French blogs and social media. English seems to be the ultimate code for being with the times. In a single post about the anti-school movement in Le Nouvel Observateur, a respected liberal outlet, the author uses words like “hoax,” “swag,” “fist-fucking,” “step-by-step,” “slash [as in the spelling-out of the punctuation mark].” As for radio, here’s a typical Frenglish tweet from @NRJhitmusiconly, the defiantly anglo handle of the the pop station NRJ, the most popular Twitter account in France:
“Un nouveau teaser du clip “You and I” des @onedirection est sorti avec le beau @Real_Liam_Payne !! Un max de RT !! http://instagram.com/p/m2S2dSSmuT/”
(Italics mine.) So much for that 40%.
When I lived in France, a guy on my fencing team (I was terrible, which is why I took up baseball) had a theory that the country was about 15 years behind America in terms of culture. This was exactly 15 years after “Rapper’s Delight,” and MC Solaar, France’s first rap star, was at the height of his fame. We were also just getting our first laugh-track sitcoms.
The fencing guy’s theory, which reflected the government’s fears, assumed that France was being dragged by a cultural leash, at least in popular entertainment. If so, the lag has shrunken drastically in the years since. I remember when it was a big event that Lethal Weapon 4 opened in France and the United States on the same day in 1998. Now, not only have social media and the Internet promulgated English as an international language, but they’ve also flattened the American-driven cultural calendar. Movies and TV shows often play simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic—and even those that don’t can easily be torrented.
What that means is that the French can now complain about Game of Thrones and How I Met Your Mother spoilers along with the rest of us. (The French word for spoilers, by the way, is spoilers.) France has fully caught up with American Internet culture, thanks in part to sites like Buzzfeed France and Buzzfeed imitators like Topito. Sample listicle: “The Top 50 Anglicisms We Use, Because French Is So Has-Been”.
The Académie Française, the highest authority on the French language, is still fighting the good fight, as it has since 1635. Its blog Dire, Ne Pas Dire snipes at individual anglicisms like “asap” and “must have,” but it feels like a lost cause. They’re like that one Japanese soldier who kept fighting World War II until the seventies because no one told him it was over. But even they feel like reports of the death of French are greatly exaggerated. According to the Académie’s site: “It is excessive to speak of an invasion of the French language. Borrowing from English is an ancient phenomenon.” The site goes on to list dozens of words imported from English—including base-ball, which entered French dictionaries at the turn of the twentieth century.
I don’t think the anglicizing of France’s culture and language is, as some might see it, a sign of French cultural atrophy. The debate over it is yet another manifestation of France’s love-hate relationship with America, which has had its highs (Lafayette, Tocqueville, The Artist) and lows (De Gaulle, freedom fries) over the years. Languages evolve, and English and French have been swapping fluids for centuries. Pick up a dictionary and look at how many Gallic words have infiltrated the lexicon since William the Conqueror. France may simply be repaying the favor.
