Macron should learn from the last time French was routed
At a time when some fear the onset of a new Cold War, you’ve got to love the French for taking global ambition to where it’s least sinister. I’m talking of the new language wars.
President Macron revealed his plans this week to better promote French as an international language that “creates tomorrow’s world”. He has particularly set his sights on France’s former colonies in Africa. This, of course, means persuading Francophone nations not to be seduced like fickle Parisians into adopting knacky English words and phrases like “supercool”, “la fashion victim” and “Les Avengers”.
What’s transfixing for we slapdash Brits is the grim determination with which the French – via the Académie Française – attempt to police and purify their native tongue. In this realm, we’re the Cheddareating surrender monkeys who long ago yielded our linguistic borders to any passing influence, or invader.
In the process, we discovered the extraordinary elasticity of our language to incorporate any words that took our fancy. Spoken English is rather like The Blob From Outer Space: it looks soft and yielding until it rolls over foreign words and sucks them into its amorphous mass, digesting and then belching them out decades later as Oed-certified lingo.
It swallowed the Romans and their Latin whole, giving us senators, circuses and the occasional caveat. Who remembers now that we stole “pyjama”, “jungle” and “thug” from India? Or that “glitch” (a word of almost unsurpassable usefulness for everything that gets derailed in the universe) came to us from Yiddish? More recently, hip-hop has gilded our vocabulary with “bling”, “twerk” and every teen’s preferred expression of enthusiasm: “Yeah, that’s dope.”
Then there are the French terms that we incorporated to the point that we own them. The Normans may have thought that they conquered us back in 1066, but our swift assimilation of their vernacular and the fact we don’t roll our Rs suggest our most spirited resistance happened on a verbal level.
More crushing still for our invaders, Nancy Mitford spoke for a generation of snobs when she mocked the cross-channel contribution to our linguistic vitality – declaring most French words in everyday English usage were terminally common, or non-u. All that hard work, sweat and tears on the Normans’ part to impose French on us as the language of the upper crust, only for the aristos to traduce, mispronounce and finally outlaw “toilet” as the most vulgar word in the entire known universe (my grandmother once told me it was preferable to say “WC, or even bog”), with “perfume” and “serviette” trailing not far behind.
It seems to me that President Macron should take a good, hard look at this previous attempt at linguistic colonisation and how catastrophically it failed.
If you truly want your mother tongue to be the all-conquering lingo of the world and its online web – which is surely where modern wars find their ultimate battleground – then it mustn’t be a cul-desac, but a gigantic freeway. (Why say “motorway” when the US has given us such a fantastic expression for the way every driver feels when they open the throttle?)
If you want to be purist about language and expression, stick to the small fights you can win – preferably grammatical. We Brits may not know how to deal with Putin, but we’ll take on any brute about misuse of the apostrophe.
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