One of the most endearing idiosyncrasies of the French is their passion for words. The French adore linguistic nuances, revere dictionaries, and collect new words and expressions like precious artifacts. There is probably nothing they love talking about more. One of the best ways to make conversation with the French is to mention an interesting word or novel expression. Over the years, we got into the habit of doing this by translating English metaphors, or using French expressions we picked up on our travels in North Africa, Belgium, or even Louisiana. The French always take the bait. They can’t help it. Pondering language is a national reflex.
Introducing exotic expressions is also a great way to change the subject when you need to. Jean-Benoît resorted to this one evening during an Arabic class he was taking at the Arab World Institute in Paris. Just before the end of class his turn came to read a particularly difficult selection. To buy some time, he described his situation with a common expression from Quebec, but unheard of in France: C’est un cadeau de Grec (literally: “It’s a Greek present,” meaning a Trojan Horse). The half-dozen other students and his teacher forgot about what they were doing and zoomed in on the new phrase, even though it was totally off topic. They wanted to know everything about it: where it came from, how long people had been using it, who used it, where. In the excitement, everyone forgot it was Jean-Benoît’s turn to read and he was off the hook.
Jean-Benoît had gotten the idea from French politicians, who frequently use this trick to avoid having to deal with topics that are potentially detrimental to their reputations. For instance, in January 2014 we watched in awe as President François Hollande used a particular term to get out of talking about the painful love triangle he found himself in. Paparazzi had discovered his love affair with the actress Julie Gayet, and Hollande’s “First Girlfriend” Valérie Trierweiler was refusing to talk to the media. With a verbal pirouette (about-face), Hollande completely diverted media attention from the love triangle to—get this—the economy. On January 15 he announced to French media that he was a social-démocrate (social democrat), a controversial term in socialist circles because it implies sympathy to the market economy. Hollande was the first socialist leader to ever openly embrace the term, and the surprise effect worked its magic. The media dropped the Julie Gayet story and spent the rest of the month speculating about what exactly Hollande meant by “social democrat.”
Languages come with their own narrative. English speakers think of their language as “open,” “flexible,” and “accommodating.” The French story is exactly the opposite. In French minds, their language is a particularly complex and nuanced tongue with no gray zones and little, if any, à peu près (approximation). Words are right or words are wrong. Every word has a precise meaning distinguishing it from other words. Grammar is correct or incorrect. The French even think about synonyms differently than do English speakers. Roget’s English thesaurus is a cornucopia of synonyms organized in categories with no definitions. French dictionaries of synonyms have few words per category and more definitions. In the French mind-set, it’s virtually impossible for two words to mean the same thing. So the French want to know the exact nuance that differentiates one word from another.
Not surprisingly, given this mind-set, linguistic nitpicking is a pretty popular pastime in France. It’s not the exclusive domain of France’s elite or literary circles. French people from all backgrounds talk about semantic nuances. It’s one of the most startling particularities of French culture. As self-employed writers we are constantly asking for receipts for deductible expenses. The French, we learned, have four different words for the word “receipt”: reçu, ticket, fiche, and quittance, each with a slightly different meaning. A reçu is the generic term, but implies a detailed statement with tax numbers. Le ticket is produced by a machine and is less detailed. La fiche is similar, but handwritten. La quittance is the most formal kind of receipt, something like a discharge: it states the name of the payer and payee, what the payment is for, and is often signed. Needless to say, we still get them confused.
The French are so bent on being precise that they’ll resort to hijacking a word from another language to add some nuance they can’t get in French. That’s how “weekend” ended up becoming a French word. Quebeckers translate weekend literally into fin de semaine, end of the week. But the fin de semaine, in France, signifies “end of the working week,” or Friday. So the French decided to call Saturday and Sunday—which come after the fin de semaine—le week-end. As far as Quebeckers are concerned, this is pointless hairsplitting, but Quebeckers are a lot less picky about language nuances than are the French.1
However, it’s fair to say that all French speakers share a certain level of interest in linguistic precision. Every March, the fifty-four member countries of the Francophonie (plus three associate members and twenty observer countries) celebrate the Semaine de la francophonie (Francophonie Week). In almost every country, organizers set up local dictées (dictation contests) for the general public or members of associations. Throughout the 1990s and until 2005, there was even an international contest, called La dictée de Bernard Pivot, named after a famous literary critic, which was broadcast to millions of viewers who actually did the exercise at home. Dictée contests are still organized locally, but since 2005, official francophone celebrations have been more geared toward celebrating regional differences in the French-speaking world. Francophonie celebrations in France are called Le mois des mots (the month of the words). A typical activity is to have people submit lists of their “favorite ten words,” often with a specific theme, like language, love, or travel. Governments in French-speaking countries also publish their own lists of favorite words. In 2014, France’s Ministry of Culture and Communications produced a series of twenty words that the organizers had chosen because they expressed the variety and creativity of the francophone world, including the Senegalese verb ambiancer (to liven up) or the archaic expression à tire larigot (continually, to one’s heart’s content).
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 language 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 of 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.)
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.