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 started 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 certain 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.
Given this perception, many French see English as an escape hatch from their own purist language culture. The French consider the use of an anglicism as less of a faute than bad French. Even respected French editors tow this line. Jean-Benoît was writing back-cover copy for a book we published in France and wanted to use the term mondialisateur (globalizer, as a noun). The editor refused outright. “You can’t say mondialisateur, it’s not French,” she declared. She proposed using an English borrowing, globalisateur, instead. Jean-Benoît replied that the French term mondialisation (globalization) had been accepted in French dictionaries, as had mondialiser (the verb to globalize). But the editor countered that the form mondialisateur had not yet been accepted in dictionaries, so readers would consider it a faute. And that was the end of the discussion. (Mondialisateur has since come into use—though not without a fight—and no one would regard it as un-French today.)
For that matter, class is a driving factor in the rising popularity of English in France. It is the exact opposite of the situation in Quebec. In Quebec, traditionally, less educated people speckle their French with English words, mainly out of ignorance. Historically, Quebec’s industry was so strongly dominated by English speakers that the largely francophone working class was often forced to speak English to their bosses, not to mention that they were deprived of proper schooling. (The stigma is still there today, even though educated Quebeckers certainly recognize the utility of speaking proper English.)
It’s the opposite dynamic in France. English pops up in French speech because the French think it makes them sound worldly, sophisticated, or cool, as in the case of our friend François. The French speak much less English, on average, than Quebeckers do. But to them, English sends a signal of modernity. That’s the best explanation we can come up with as to why the French version of the televised singing competition The Voice is called The Voice (pronounced “zee voyiss” with a heavy French accent). Quebec just translated the show as La Voix, as Hispanic TV did with La Voz.8
To their credit, the French do put English to good use and manage to come up with some creative linguistic innovations in the form of puns and witty combinations of English and French vocabulary and syntax. The newspaper Libération published a profile of a thirty-six-year-old female butcher who had gone into the business against her parents’ will at the age of fourteen. They called the piece “Very Good Tripes” (the French word tripes, for pork chitterlings, is pronounced exactly like “trip” in English). France’s Limousin region had an advertising campaign in the Paris subway with the slogan “Are You Lim?” (Are you in?), which was rather cute. Elle published an article about the Australian actress Naomi Watts with the title “Watt’s Happening?” Libération even used English to make fun of a French acronym: “Don’t Worry, Be HADOPI” was the title of an article about France’s Internet copyright protection agency, the Haute autorité pour la diffusion des œuvres et la protection des droits sur Internet (HADOPI). In other words, the French are helping themselves to English like everyone else on the planet, and having a lot of fun with it.
The controversy erupts, and purists’ feathers consequently get ruffled, when the French maladroitly conscript English to substitute for perfectly good French words. We saw a French ad for a running-shoe brand describing the footwear as “sneakers casual et trendy,” using the English words “casual” and “trendy” even though the French equivalents, décontractés and tendances, mean exactly the same thing. In an article about “le baby shower,” one clumsy reporter translated the phenomenon as a “douche de bébés” (a special type of shower for babies? Or a shower of babies?), not a shower of gifts for bébé. In 2012 France’s industry minister, Arnaud Montebourg, developed a program to boost industrial promotion in France that he bizarrely dubbed “Made in France,” in English. Then there was the French press that dubbed the rampant criticism of President François Hollande le Hollande-bashing, and the business press that used the neo-English manageurs instead of gestionnaires or cadre (distinct French terms for two different types of manager) and trader instead of courtier. Of course, the French are still coming to terms with discussing business and money, so using pseudo-English might also be a way of subtly distancing themselves from a subject they don’t really like talking about anyway.
French businesses themselves have a long love affair with make-believe English. Outstanding examples are the grocery chain Leader Price and the pizza chain Speed Rabbit Pizza. In recent years France’s famous retail chain, Monoprix, launched a catering service called “Monop Daily”—they tried “Mono Deli,” but “deli” wasn’t quite English enough, not to mention very close to the French word délit (offense), so French marketers went all the way and made it “daily.” For that matter, the French have adopted a number of English borrowings that English speakers would never even understand, like Recordman (French for record holder), babyfoot (table football), or the slang besta (children’s lingo for best ami, friend). Other English words have entirely separate careers in French, like zapping (channel surfing) or brushing (a blow dry for hair), destined exclusively for French consumption.
But the main drive behind the rise in English borrowings and pseudo-English in French business is simple: English sells, or at least that’s what French marketers believe. Although coffee is marketed as “Italian” in France, its mother tongue is English. While we were in France, Nescafé ran a campaign with the English slogan “Coffee is not just black.” Nespresso ran commercials with the English slogan “What else?” in which George Clooney and Matt Damon delivered their lines without subtitles. In 2014 Nespresso even hired the French actor Jean Dujardin for the campaign, then had him speak English.
The European Union is another factor behind the rise of English in French advertising. We discussed the issue with Catherine Grelier-Lenain, the director of ethics at the Autorité de régulation professionnelle de la publicité (ARPP), France’s regulatory agency for the publicity industry, and she confirmed our impression. As Grelier-Lenain explained, large European companies now produce pan-European advertising campaigns in English, then adapt them for each European market, so English is a convenient common tongue. “English also sells,” she told us.
Another part of the problem is ARPP itself. The ARPP is one of a group of agencies and associations officially mandated to enforce France’s Toubon law, which has the rather open-ended goal of making sure “French companies communicate to the French public in a way that is understandable to them.” But it is a self-regulating body composed of advertising professionals, so members cut each other a lot of slack. For that matter, the ARPP has very loose criteria for what constitutes a violation of the Toubon law. As Grelier-Lenain explained, words that have already become part of current French vocabulary are exempt. She cited the French slogan for the hotel chain Sofitel, “Life is magnifique,” as an example. “That respects the law,” she said. “The word ‘life’ is part of mainstream French vocabulary, so the Frenchness of the advertiser is made clear.”
The only legal actions actually taken in France to counter “abusive” uses of English have come from the Direction générale de la concurrence, de la consommation et de la répression des fraudes (Directorate-General for Competition, Consumer Affairs, and Prevention of Fraud). However, with fraud investigations part of the organization’s mandate, English has never been a high priority. Another organization that has been mandated to monitor English, France’s Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel (French Broadcasting Authority), took almost two decades to act. Jean-Benoît attended its first ever symposium about monitoring French, in December 2013, eighteen years after the CSA got its mandate. In short, stomping out English is not a high priority in France’s power circles.9
Though a struggle against English seems increasingly futile, France has its qualified “resistors.” Most of them belong to one of fifty volunteer “language protection” associations scattered across the country. And curiously, almost all of them are volunteers. When it comes to language protection, the French government itself is amazingly low-profile—or recalcitrant, the language protection groups would say. That’s because the government has only given five of these organizations any real power to do anything about protecting French. According to the Toubon law, these five, and only these five, can file formal complaints about language violations to the government on behalf of citizens. (That means citizens can only file complaints through these organizations.) The problem is, the associations rely almost entirely on volunteers and receive only tiny subsidies from the government. When Julie visited one of them, Avenir de la langue française (Future of the French Language), she found herself in a cramped, run-down office with a broken printer and barely enough space for her to sit down and take notes. At another meeting, she spoke to Marc Favre d’Echallens, the spokesman for the biggest of France’s private language defense groups, Défense de la langue française (Defense of the French Language). “A lot of people, especially in publicity, don’t even know there’s a law to protect French!” he told her, exasperated by the lack of interest in what he considered an urgent problem. But the French don’t see the emergency.10
French multinationals, meanwhile, are pushing English down employees’ throats—in some cases they actually force French employees to use English terminology while serving French clients. At the French distribution giant Carrefour, employees in the TV department get training on le cross merchandising, le remodeling, la supply chain, le e-learning. Sometimes the training is actually in English. Language protection has long been designated as a right-wing issue in France, but that is changing as blue-collar and service-industry workers are starting to revolt in the face of what they see as unjustified requirements for English proficiency. “English is a job requirement for workers who only interact with French people,” complained Georges Gastaud, a Carrefour employee who launched a new language-defense association supported by none other than France’s Communist Party. Gastaud filed an official request to France’s National Assembly for the creation of a committee to examine “linguistic abuse.” “We are stuck fighting for the elementary right to work in French in France. Isn’t that crazy?”
But French language purism will help fend off English even if it’s only subconsciously. The French are the first to say they are “bad” at learning foreign languages. One of our daughters’ principals (they had three over the course of a year) announced fatalistically, “It’s not worth teaching English to the French. They can’t learn second languages.” The French, of course, don’t suffer from some collective congenital language-learning handicap. What they have is a mental block due to their own purist culture. The French try to teach English the same way they teach French, with rule-oriented methods and a purist approach.11 They are, of course, missing the point. English is not purist in spirit, and English grammar and spelling rules have so many exceptions the language cannot really be mastered using a rote-learning approach. To obtain her aggregation (professorship) credentials, our friend Anne Dupont, a qualified English teacher, had to learn by heart some twelve hundred ways the English language represents forty-four different sounds. English-speaking teachers who teach English don’t even learn this. Aside from the fact that rule-based language teaching methods are not effective, they create a blind spot among the French when they are learning English. When François Hollande wrote to Barack Obama to congratulate him for his reelection in 2012, he added a handwritten “friendly” to his signature, thinking he was using an adverb (like “sincerely”), unaware that in English, the -ly ending can actually make an adjective.
Purism will always have the last word in France. At our daughters’ school, the parents’ enthusiasm for English teaching had worn off like a back-to-school crush by November. There was only one qualified English teacher at the school, and parents literally chased him out of the school because of his unorthodox teaching methods, and the fact that he didn’t give enough French dictées to his class.
The French government doesn’t need to pass more laws to fend off English. French parents are doing the job very well on their own.