Mark my words: the scourge of Franglais

It is not just English speakers. The French - or some of them - are also aghast at what is being done to their language. That was my theme in this week's My Word column in The National, Abu Dhabi ...

Over dinner in a Parisian suburb, a friend told me of the dismay she had felt on seeing a sign in a local furniture store advertising a closing down sale with the promise of une sacrification of prices.

Since we can easily work out what the shop-owner meant, I suppose the phrase comfortably passes the Stephen Fry test, discussed in a previous column, of acceptable use of language. My friend will not be surprised, however, to learn that when I typed the word into an online French-English dictionary search, I was assured that no translation could be found.

It was not her only example of the liberties being taken with the French language. But there is nothing especially new about the process.

More than 25 years ago, on holiday in Brittany, I watched a French television news report on traffic flow. It was a bank holiday weekend but there was no trace of the heavy congestion that had been widely predicted in the preceding days.

Someone in the studio had come up with the bright idea of placing, in a prominent position behind the presenter's head, the slogan ça roule cool, a morsel of Franglais indicating that all was running smoothly. My well brought up French wife was so horrified at what was being done to the language of Molière (though it could be argued that the language of Shakespeare had not escaped unscathed) that she rattled off an irate letter to Jack Lang, then France's culture minister.

In it she described the efforts of a small group of Anglo-French couples in a provincial English city to organise formal after-school classes in French to maintain their children's contact with that part of their identity. She contrasted the work of la petite école française de Bristol with the cavalier attitude of state-owned French TV.

Needless to say, it took a junior member of the minister's department months to reply, and even then he offered little more than a routine affirmation of the French government's commitment to protecting the language.

In the time that has elapsed since that exchange of correspondence, things have gone from bad to worse for French language purists. More and more Franglais peppers news reports and chat on television, and invades the printed page. Jacques Chirac's grand campaign to halt the march of Anglo-Saxon culture has failed; whenever we tuned to France 24 in the UAE, we found programmes in Arabic and English, never in French.

On the letters page of The Guardian, London, I found a lament from Ken Thomson, from the Queen's English Society of all bodies, about the French tendency to opt for le doughnuts when they already have a blameless equivalent of their own, le beignet, or un short for a pair of shorts instead of the rather more elegant pantalon court. I had to look up the apparently plural form of doughnut to confirm that this is what the French use, and it is. My wife argues that un short in actually much shorter than un pantalon court; she was lost for words when asked to explain why it should be un short whatever the length.

My kindred spirits at the wonderfully named Académie de la Carpette Anglaise have, in each of the past 10 years, awarded the "civic indignity" of the English Carpet prize to the members of the French establishment judged to have acquiesced most deplorably in the use of English to the detriment of French.

Last year, for example, the minister of higher education and research, Valérie Pécresse, was awarded the prize as punishment for her declaration that with French in decline, it was necessary to break remaining taboos on the use of English within EU institutions. A special international award went to a police force in the French-speaking part of Switzerland for calling itself the "United Police of Geneva".

I have kept this for last, but am sure even some readers with a little knowledge of French will welcome an answer. Why carpette anglaise? The literal translation is obvious. But in this context, it means doormat and if there is a moral to my tale, it is that no language should allow itself to become a doormat for another.

Comments

[louise]

R.I.P. Maurice Druon ...
who loved the English language but sought to protect the French language from 'Franglais' and femaninisation - that looks like a non word!

[Bill Taylor]

Even the name Jack Lang sounds as if it could be Franglais.
Quebecois use a lot of anglicisms -- c'est cool, for instance, as an expression of approval -- but ironically Quebec is one of the few places in the world that tends not to have "stop" signs at intersections. They generally opt for "arrêt."

[Will Buckley]

Dormat?

[colinrandall1@gmail.com]

Good spot, Will. The typo was corrected, as it has now been here, but before publication. Now spot the error THEY introduced...