As a French journalist who uses English in my day job, I’ve found an easy way to make my British colleagues foam at the mouth: just remove the u from “colour” or “humour” in emails, write “mom” instead of “mum”, and use sentences such as “can I get a coffee?” when you should be politely asking “can I have a cup of tea?”. It drives them crazy: I see them twitch, annoyed at the liberties I am taking.
And to be fair, why wouldn’t they be outraged? British people take a tremendous amount of pride in their language (not to mention the fact that they secretly think their accent is superior). So why shouldn’t the French be expected to feel the same way?
The issue came to the fore this week when France’s culture secretary, Fleur Pellerin, declared that the French should not be afraid of foreign words, that we needed to wake up to the real world and not build unnecessary barriers to linguistic diversity.
Pellerin is wading in dangerous waters. France has, for years, waged a battle against Anglicisms. Public intellectuals routinely warn of the impoverishment of literary skills in the classroom, moaning that “kids these days don’t know how to speak” (this sentiment is partly responsible for the fact that French radio stations are required to play 40% of songs in French, thanks to the Toubon law).
Pellerin’s supporters, however, may have the ineluctable march of time on their side. They’re quick to remind us that languages are not monuments – they’re living, breathing systems and, above all, they’re tools for communication. As a result, they constantly evolve – and all those bores whining about the good olde days sound like retirees who still insist on paying their bills by snail mail, with a handwritten cheque.
I’m not one of those bores, but I wonder about what’s lost in the process. I picked up the phone to talk to Remy, a Parisian friend of mine who works as a professional translator. He pointed out that, to be sure, French and English had different strengths in different settings. Take diplomacy, for example: French and English were the first two diplomatic languages of the League of Nations after the first world war. Remy believes French is the perfect diplomatic language, because the way one conveys an argument is as important as the argument itself. A French diplomat can ramble on for 20 minutes and say absolutely nothing. You can get by elegantly using terms with a strong cultural appeal – solidarité this, courage politique that – without actually talking about the topic at hand (say, the Middle East peace process). In French, we call this obfuscation noyer le poisson (“to drown the fish”). In other words, by using French to perfection, you can lose both meaning and listeners. Perfect for a diplomat!
English, on the other hand, is much more direct, and Remy tells me that British or American politicians wouldn’t dare copy their French colleagues. The public is not fooled, and can immediately spot the lack of substance in the argument. So in getting rid of “proper” French, we might lose a way to fool voters and numb political opponents into submission.
This brings me back to Pellerin, who might subscribe to Schumpeter’s theory of creative destruction – that in order to survive, language cannot afford to stay put: it has to mutate, to stretch itself, to shed its skin. She could be right, and French has certainly been given a new lease of life thanks to the input of immigrants, from Portugal all the way to Nigeria (French hip-hop, sometimes mixing verlan, créole and Arab words, can feel like a giant linguistic party). No one in their right mind could expect French people to still speak like Balzac at the dinner table.
But sometimes, just sometimes, I’m reminded of how much my generation has lost by adopting a cheapened version of French, peppered with English words. This jumped at me recently as I read Alfred Kubin’s The Other Side, written in 1909 and translated into French from German in the 1960s. French back then, I marvelled, was so poetic, so erudite! No one knows how to use the pluperfect past tense any more, and with its disuse an entire (posh and slightly pretentious) way of narrating has died.
Instead, I turn the TV on, and wonder how my grandparents’ generation can understand words such as “replay”, “le buzz”, “tuning” or “uploadé”. It’s irritating, and in those moments I find I have time for the political figures and academics in Québéc who have more or less declared a fatwa against English words.
So I’m not yet ready to be devoured by the language of capitalism, even if I know that growing pains are inevitable. Just like the British will never consent to saying “y’all” until their dying day. As we say in France: “on lâche rien”.
