by Jacques Delacroix
The French language is under attack from two sources. And no, neither the first nor the second are the English language, or not exactly, not properly speaking. Let me introduce myself. I am an old man. I have been speaking and reading, occasionally, even writing in French for about 80 years. I have been operational in English and speaking it daily for the last 65 years. Feel free to consider me an expert in the French language.
The first line of attack is the invasion of slang. I, who speak a beautiful, classical French – kept under refrigeration for the fifty years of my immigration into America – would not especially mind except that it’s bad slang. Let me explain. Current French slang simply consists in saying things backward with some orthographic changes : femme (woman) – meuf; noir (black) = renoi; Juif (Jew) = Fuij, etc.
It’s not inventive (like the Cockney rhyming slang is inventive); it’s not a source of merriment or fantasy. It does not even perform well the first function of a slang, which is to be a secret language.
The second source of attack, is not exactly English, it’s the form of pseudo-English that is to be found on the internet, often in some sort of Frenchified form. It goes from the technical “liker” pour “like” as in a Facebook display, to the words “au feeling,” which means, I think: I did not know why I liked him but I felt like I did so, I went for it. This make some sort of sense but it makes you wonder how the French speakers expressed that feeling before they discovered the English word “feeling.”
Our young contemporaries routinely mix the two kinds of borrowed word, like this: “La meuf est une hateuse; elle marche pas au feeling,” which, nobody who learned French in the very best of schools will understand.
And then, there is the borrowing that might be justified because it designates a phenomenon unknown in the French speaking country where the borrowing takes place. Being absent from France and other French speaking countries for many years, I am perplexed by the French word “date.”
I am pretty sure, the practice of formally inviting someone of the opposite sex (or not), getting all scrubbed up and dressed up, and then going out someplace that the inviting party can’t afford, that practice did not exist in France or in Belgium fifty years ago. It does not exist (yet?) in French speaking Africa and probably not in Haiti. It may be known in Quebec because of the American influence. I don’t know about the French speaking parts of Belgium and Switzerland. So, now that this approach to companionship and sex seems to have found its way into France, and possibly into several French speaking countries, it’s legitimate that it do so under an American name because the custom originated in America. “Je l’ai invitée à une date.” = I invited her on a date.
In parallel with internet English and somewhat co-penetrated by it is the faulty to impenetrable English found in (pay attention) the French dubbing of American movies. Let me explain the magnitude of the phenomenon. Any year that the sale of movie tickets for French movies in France reaches more than 50% of total, there is a big celebration in the country. The remaining half or so are for foreign movies, more than 9/10 American. It’s possible to see American movies in their original version but since few people in French speaking countries know English, those original versions can only be seen in a dozen specialized theaters in France. (I don’t know about other countries; Belgium might do better.) Dubbing reigns. It’s nearly always poor to very poor.
Tech note: Let me say that it’s entirely possible that in the ranks of people in their twenties and early thirties are quite a few people with a good mastery of English. They don’t form, shape, determine the language though.
The following Franglais words are used routinely in France although there are perfectly valid French equivalents:
matcher
tutoring
starting blocks
team
pitcher (Heard in a French culture show)
live
hater
chill (as a noun)
from scratch
fake
burnout
to initiate
ego-boosting
tip
LOL (“laughs a lot”)
And, of course, the old favorite “sweetshirt.”
The tendency is all-pervasive. A French reporter visits a rural elementary school in Senegal. The common language is French which the Senegalese children speak with impressive purity. When trying to describe a kite surfer, the reporter lapses into English and uses the word “kite.” It’s not much but it’s how the habit spreads away from France.
The double assault on the French language by mindless slang and Frenglish also deprives us of delicious French expressions such as: “Faire l’école buisssonière.” (To go to school in the bushes.) = To cut school. “Prendre le chemin des écoliers.” = To take the schoolboy’s path to…. To meander on the way to where you are going. And also, the delightful expression: “Elle a vu le loup.” (She has seen the wolf.) to describe a young woman – never a young man – who almost had sex. And to finish, we have the exquisite: “Elle a la cuisse légère.” (Her thigh is lightweight.) to describe a fast woman.
Now, I can’t prove a cause and effect relationship between slang and Frenglish on the one hand and the disappearance of such expressions in the French language but the coincidence in time between the two categories of phenomena and this vanishing is troubling, at least.
There are disappearances that put you on track to explain others. For a thousand years, the French said “Je rentre chez moi” to mean “I am going back home.” “Chez” was a small convenient word which meant somebody’s house, like this: “chez moi,” “my house,” “chez lui,” “his house,” “chez nous,” “our house.” And so forth. The word “chez” suddenly disappeared from the French speech in France. (I am not sure about anywhere else.) I mean by “suddenly” that I did not notice it though I have trucking with the French language almost every day. The word was replaced by the more complicated: “Je rentre à la maison.” “I am going back to my house,” “I am going back home.” It’s obviously copied from English and superfluous.
This replacement does not have terrible consequences because it has the merit of preserving clarity. When a person says it there is no question where he is going. But how did this substitution happen? It’s completely self-evident to me that it’s a literal translation from English. It’s, in fact, a moderately bad translation. Confronted with the words, “I am going home,” a well-read Frenchman would have unhesitatingly translated, “Je rentre chez moi.” So, I think would a well-read Senegalese, by the way. The problem is that the masters of the media in France are not well-read. You might call them semi-educated. They get much of their news and much of their inspiration for programs from the US internet. They read almost exclusively the New York Times and AP. They translate directly from those sources that they don’t understand very well. It’s so painful, they don’t have the extra energy needed to do a good translation, by which I mean a translation faithful to the French language, to the original French language. That’s how they write text that is in-between English and French, difficult to understand, it seems to me and sometimes impossible to understand. Let me tell you a story that illustrates this point almost magically.
A long time ago, the daily Le Monde, the go-to paper for the French intelligentsia, published a long article on India’s policy about its nuclear weapons. The main theme of the article was simply that India was pursuing a policy of deception with its nuclear weapons. That is, it was hiding them and lying about them. OK, pay attention folks, I am going to tell you something you won’t believe. The French word “déception” means “disappointment,” exactly, no more, no less. The French special envoy to India went on and on, on the front page as well as continuing inside, about how India had a nuclear policy of… disappointment. Made absolutely no freaking sense. The next day and the next five, I dutifully bought Le Monde, expecting a correction or a least a deadly acerbic comment from at least one reader. Nothing. This goes to prove two things: First a seasoned foreign correspondent sent to do a report in an English-speaking country stumbled badly and insistently on the simple word “deception.” How far does the ignorance extend one might ask legitimately? Second, this episode demonstrates that the educated fraction of the French population, those who read Le Monde, can read two pages of absolute non-sense without raising an eyebrow, if it comes from English.
The morale of the story is that much is usually lost in translation, especially when the translators have a wiggly knowledge of the language from which they translate. But in France today, this is happening on a mass scale.
Much less dramatically, there exists in the French language a drift that goes against clarity. Once, in a charming Belgian television show, I heard a producer who was from Quebec use the French word “définitivement” as if it was equivalent to the English word “definitely” which it definitely resembles, morphologically. The problem is that the French word “définitif” already has a meaning, a clear meaning; it means “without end, forever.” We could make do without this accepted word by inventing a new French word, but this would take years. In the meantime, much unnecessary confusion would be sown. (I have heard this use of the French word several times since then but it seems to have died of its own accord, I am happy to report.)
One more thing: I am completely convinced that the more fluent in English a French person is, the less likely he is to indulge in this sort of Frenglish. This may be because a high degree of fluency in English implies a good education and a well educated person, in France as everywhere else, cares about exact language.
I see two reasons for this constant borrowing from English and English-like language. The first is that if you lard your French with English terms some of the uninitiated will end up thinking you are bilingual. As I said until recently, few French speakers also knew English. If you appeared bilingual, it made you a superior person. (The “uninitiated” because truly bilingual people keep their languages strictly separate. Look at me!)
The second reason for the borrowing only applies to the French; I don’t know about other French speakers though I suspect the Quebecquers of being in the same predicament. The French have their very superior cuisine, the evenly good taste of their upper class, the slimness of their women, and their neo-classical tragedies. That’s a lot and that’s not enough. Up and down the social ladder, they suffer from acute modernitylessness. They feel they are always behind with innovation. (I personally think they are largely right.) So, they go get modernity where it’s obviously located and abundantly available, the US. In this context every use of an English word, or of an English-like word, even the gross misuse of such, counts like a shot of modernity. For some, it’s addictive.
As for my provocative title and the thought behind it, one might remark that the French language has 130,000 words so, it will take a long time before they are all replaced by slang words and by Frenglish. That’s true enough but it’s precisely the most common vocables and expressions that are being replaced. Soon, everyday French will be replaced by a salmigondi of poor expressiveness. (“Salmigondi,” you see, I did it to you.) Personally, I look forward to quickly becoming a linguistic antique.
Jacques Delacroix is a writer who lives in Santa Cruz, California. He used to be a college professor. Send him mail.
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