16 March 2016

Parlez-vous franglish ?

This week is officially the Semaine de la langue française. On Télématin this morning they are saying that about 10% of the everyday vocabulary in France (meaning mostly Paris and the media) is made up of words only recently borrowed from English, both British and American. Sometimes it appears nothing in France can be really stylish, exciting, important, or interesting unless there is an English name for it that those "in the know" use liberally. That's really nothing new here — I can testify to that after spending the last 50 years learning to speak French.


Of course, the terms often get re-made into something almost unrecognizable when they pass into French. One example they gave this morning is the word "buzz," meaning a lot of talk and noise around some exciting event or concept. In French, the expression is faire le buzz — "to make the buzz" — which is what you'd say about a successful film or fashion that everybody is talking about. There used to be a popular TV show here called Tout le monde en parle ("everybody's talking about it"), about current trends. I guess today that would be Ça fait le buzz. (The word "buzz" is pronounced plus ou moins as in English.)

Back in the 1960s a Sorbonne professor coined the term « franglais » to give a name to the kind of faddish and affected French littered with English terms that people had begun speaking. Plus ça change... now the preferred term seems to be « le franglish ». If you heard that a man was en smoking would you know that means he was wearing a tuxedo? Here's a list of 50 common anglicismes that I just found on the internet. Most are recognizable. One you hear all the time is, well, le timing. Any English word ending in -ing is a good candidate for adoption into franglish.


It's too bad the regular host of Télématin, William (is that a franglish name?) Leymergie, is on vacation this week. His show consist of a series of reports about current trends and events presented by a crew of young, mostly hip and smart chroniqueurs, with news and weather reports interspersed. He's been the host for more than 30 years. It's all very Parisian and everybody says vous to everybody else during the show, even though in real life you know they'd be tutoyer-ing each other freely. Le pauvre William spends a good amount of his time on the air just correcting the younger set's French, suggesting French translations for all the franglish they love to spout. He missed his opportunity this time.

It's hard to imagine such a situation in America. We have French names for a few typically French things — a croissant is one example — but otherwise newly-borrowed French terms are rare, aren't they? And we have our "English-only" fanatics, but can you imagine an English Language Week in the States? I guess it just means that the French are paying more attention to what's happening outside France than we are paying to what's going on outside the United States.

13 comments:

  1. Saying 'Yes!' emphatically is currently very trendy, as is 'bye bye'. Most people say 'bizness' because there kind of isn't a good equivalent in French when one is specifically refering to commercial activities. Eavesdropping in cafes and restaurants reveals just how much English French people under 40 pepper their conversation with.

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  2. The man of the couple I stayed with in Tours, a banker, was in quite a pickle because he did not speak english. He was worried that he would lose his job, or be transferred to another county where english is not as common. He was not looking forward to that prospect. And I am certain his wife - a Parisian - was not looking forward to that either.

    The first time I went to France in the early 80's, only the children spoke, or were willing to speak, english. And my french was minimal at best.

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  3. Yes, that is a fun list. I especially liked "un has-been."

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  4. Living in Buenos Aires, we immediately got a tutor and began to learn at least basic Castellano. I was a semi failure, I can speak Spanish , badly, but the teacher annoyed me. Apparently , when I grow up, I won't let things like that bother me. So my Castellano was pretty bad but because it was Buenos Aires, the (so so lovely) people would get excited when I would speak to them and try out their English, that they were so proud to be able to speak. They shamed me with their enthusiasm.
    Now , of course, here I am, back in the US .. and I remember all my Castellano and there is no one to talk to :)

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  5. And one of the most important French terms is ... le week-end.

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  6. My french is not very good, but I usually get by because our languages share so many words in common and I try to think of those in conversation. I read many novels that are full of French, such as Louise Penny- I love books peppered with foreign phrases.

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    1. It's always good to try saying an English word, especially one that seems like it might have come from Latin (thru French), with a French accent to see if that turns out to be something comprehensible to the French ear. It often works.

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  7. If we tried to have an English week, the prior question would be - which English? British English is peppered with local idioms and vocabulary, not to mention loan words from other languages. You'd have to have more than a certain je ne sais quoi, not to mention Sitzfleisch to work through it all and the bravura to face down all the criticisms; in fact it would take more than the whole week even to get started.........

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    1. American English and UK English have a complete range of "faux amis"... To the American speaker a fender is a car bumper...to us it is what you put in front of the fire... A hood is the bonnet...to us it is the soft-top of a convertible...and now there is Hinglish to contend with...
      As for French... I like "le crumble".... And rhubarb season is beginning!!

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    2. It's not the faux amis between UK and US usage that are mysterious, it's all the regional dialect, terms, and expressions used in the UK. The US has regionalisms too, but not on the same scale. The UK ones are opaque in meaning. You can't figure them out; you have to be told what they mean. Is UK English becoming a loose grouping of dialects without much centralizing influence. Neighbors of mine who come from Yorkshire tell me they can have trouble communicating with Londoners.

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  8. Wow, did this posting bring back memories. That Sorbonne professor, Rene Etiemble, gave a lecture at the University of Illinois in 1970 following the publication of his book, Parlez-vous franglais, and he drew a huge crowd. As a timid undergrad, I remember summoning the courage to ask him (in French) what he thought of the French Academy's effort at the time to purify the French language. His response: "Ah, la pauvre Academie!"

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    1. I remember hearing about Etiemble's lecture at the U of I — I arrived there in September 1971, after the fact. Oui, la pauvre Académie. People in other countries might get the idea that the Académie Française exercises some real control over the French language, but in fact it is just one of the forces at play in the language's evolution. The media and popular usage are probably more important players nowadays.

      I remember once that a translator colleague asked me where the English language academy met and how it worked. When I told him there wasn't one (he probably knew that, but was teasing me), he asked, well how do you know what's correct and incorrect in English? What new words are acceptable? What is grammatical? Somehow, we just know, don't we?

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