French must drop 'ineffective barriers' against other languages – minister

Culture secretary Fleur Pellerin issues volte-face over laws protecting native tongue from foreign invaders and upheld by Académie Française

Culture secretary Fleur Pellerin

Cardinal Richelieu founded the Académie Française, which is tasked with “defining … elaborating … and fixing the use of French”. Photograph : Bob Thomas/Popperfoto/Popperfoto/Getty Images

In most places it would have barely made the news. In France, it was near-revolutionary.

The country, declared the culture minister, Fleur Pellerin, should not be afraid of foreign words and should consider outside influences enriching. Its language needed to wake up to the real world and not build unnecessary barriers to linguistic diversity, she added.

Pellerin’s words marked an official volte-face in a country where the language is protected by laws upheld and guarded by academics known as “immortals” at the Académie Française.

The Académie is frequently ridiculed for its attempts to come up with French alternatives to popular and widely used English terms, including weekend (fin de semaine), email (courriel) and sub-prime (prêt hypotécaire à risque).

Korean-born Pellerin, who speaks French, German and English, made it clear she disagreed with a 1994 law that seeks to defend French from foreign invaders and insists that any sign or advertisement in the public space “must be written in French”.

“French is not in danger and my responsibility as minister is not to put up ineffective barriers against other languages but to give all our citizens the means to make it live on,” Pellerin said.

“A language is always moving,” she added in launching French Language Week and Francophonie, a series of events across 70 countries in the French-speaking world. There are an estimated 274 million French speakers on five continents. Language specialists predict the number will reach 700 million in 2050.

“Certain languages, like English today and Italian in the past, have shown themselves particularly generous in offering French hundreds of new words,” Pellerin said. However, she conceded some terms simply did not make sense in French – especially those relating to digital subjects, such as email and e-commerce. The English e sound is represented by the letter i in French.

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“The word e-commerce, for example, makes no sense in French from a linguistic point of view because the ‘e’ is not pronounced the same, so we have to think about this,” the minister said.

An exhibition to mark this week’s French language celebration called “Dis-moi dix mots (Give me 10 words) examines 10 widely used French words and their foreign or regional origins, including amour, from Latin; bijou from Breton; abricot, from Arabia via Spanish and Portuguese; valser, from German; bizarre, from Italy; and clown and circus, from English; though it helpfully reminds visitors that between the 11th and 15th centuries most of the Anglo-Norman language used in England came from France.

The 40-member Académie Française – founded in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII’s chief minister – is tasked with “defining … elaborating … and fixing the use of French” and is famed for its attempts to see off anglophone invaders. It is made up of writers, linguists, historians and philosophers, and membership is for life.

The Haitian-born Quebecois writer Dany Laferrière, present at the launch of Francophonie week with Pellerin, and who is also an immortal, told the audience that French had to be transmitted to future generations.

“We have to write, read, recount stories, tell our neighbours what books we like; a language must first and foremost live otherwise it’s just an ideology,” he said.

Alain Rey, author of the Historic Dictionary of the French Language and member of the Académie’s general commission of terminology and neology, a 17-member group of professors, linguists, and scientists – among others – said words went back and forth between countries and countries.

He gave the example of an English word, challenge, which he said it would be absurd to object to because it was originally French. Passing legislation to outlaw foreign terms, he added, was like “tilting at windmills”.

The commission’s most recent suggestions are mot-dièse for hashtag, mégadonnées for big data, and éreintage as in bashing of the French kind. The Académie’s suggestions do not always catch on; a recommendation in its official journal of December 2006 for a French equivalent for podcasting, came up with “diffusion pour baladeur” or “broadcast for walkman”.

Later, Pellerin told a meeting of the Anglo-American Press Association in Paris: “English has always fascinated me because it’s easy to create new words or join two words and make a new word.” She added that her favourite word was serendipity, which she added had been officially assimilated into the French language.

Source : thegardian.com, le jeudi 12 mars 2015

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