The weekly column

Article 24, August 2000

LINGUA NON GRATA

An Informal Look at the Invasion of Anglicisms and Americanisms in Modern French

By Daniel K. Sokol

"On February 14, 1984, the police court of Pantin sentences the chain Quick to pay a 500 FF fine and 3 000 FF in damages to the AGULF. Grounds: Terms on the menu such as 'hamburger, big cheese, soft drink' and ' irish coffee'…"

This article will deal mainly with the lexical state of modern French but, for the sake of completeness, I shall dwell very briefly on the history of the franco-english relationship.

It is only in the 17^th century that France really started to borrow words from English. The linguist Pierre Guiraud took the trouble to count the number of borrowed words in each century, starting in the 12^th and ending in 1965.

TABLE 1

'Number of Anglicisms and Americanisms in French from the Twelth to the Twentieth Century'

Century	XII	XIII	XIV	XV	XVI	XVII	XVIII	XIX	XX
Borrowed words	8	2	11	6	14	67	134	377	75

Needless to say that the figure for this century is way below what it really is: "..since the end of the last war, the words taken from British and American English constitute the bulk of the borrowings in French, leaving Arabic and Italian a long way behind…" writes Rey-Debove.

The oldest borrowed words from English are commercial and maritime terms. In 1685, the Edit de Nantes caused the exodus of thousands of Huguenots to England. The borrowings of that period are mainly from sport and politics. England’s political and economic prestige in the latter part of the 17th century is largely responsible for the period’s anglophilia. This carries on to the next century where we find more and more French words borrowed from English, although some are left intact such as 'pudding' and 'groom', some are adapted (undergo a ‘Francisation’), for example 'redingote' from 'riding-coat' or 'bouledogue' from 'bulldog'. The 18th century also sees the first apparition of Americanisms such as 'dollar' and 'Yankee'. The 19th century, as the table suggests, witnesses a radical intensification in lexical borrowing. Rebecca Posner states that English loanwords "became a deluge from the mid-nineteenth century.". As one would expect, many of the words are linked to science and technology: 'tramway, tunnel, ion, télescoper, linoleum'…etc but a significant number were adopted from the fields of commerce, sport and fashion. There are more words from America as well, for example 'spiritisme', 'poker' and 'cocktail'. Here too we will see a crescendo continuing into the next century. In fact, the phenomenon became so widespread that in his 1964 book ‘Parlez-vous Franglais’, M.R. Etiemble wittily affirms that the whole French culture is experiencing a ‘coca-colonisation’.

The question one must ask is why does a language, in our case French, borrow words. M. Johnson writes: "lexical borrowing is today the result of the international socio-economic exchange. Science, sport, technology, the media and so many other activities to which men are devoted to, are the determining factors of lexical borrowing". Many linguists (Johnson included) believe in the self-explanatory ‘law of least effort’ which, in this case, would claim that French speakers favor anglicisms because the words are concise, take little time to pronounce and are consequently better adapted to today's hectic lifestyle. Although there is undoubtedly an element of truth in the ‘law of least effort’, to categorically attribute borrowings to the above would be wrong. Psycho-social factors must be considered. Part of the explanation can be found in Saussure's ‘Course in General Linguistics’, in which the author argues that pure synonymy does not exist: "…all words that express similar ideas limit one another: synonyms such as redouter, craindre, avoir peur only have their own meaning because of their opposition; if redouter didn't exist, all its content would go to its competitors." To say that one can replace ‘shopping’ by ‘chalandage’ is therefore wrong since the very fact that the word is foreign alters its semantic value. I far prefer John Orr’s reason for word borrowing. He believes borrowings occur:

…through an impossibility to find an equivalent in one's language, through an inability to detect in the ideological material available, and the relevant linguistic material, analogies sufficiently close to justify its use for a new purpose: so 'crawl', swimming term, and 'swing', boxing term, will be borrowed unchanged. We use them too, even when the analogies exist, for team or group spirit and to indicate its special and technical character, particular to the group, which, in our minds, we would lose by using a word from everyday language: L’anglais, ça fait sportif. (my underlining).

He then goes on to list two more reasons: "one uses them out of snobbery" which he attributes once more to the team spirit (he names golf and tennis as examples) and "one uses them out of laziness". English today is more fashionable than ever in France, especially among the young, and this has resulted in a great proliferation of English words. This is rapidly filtering through to the older generation too : only a few months ago, I heard to my great amusement one of my mother’s tennis partners enthusiastically say "moi, tu sais, je suis vraiment très speed" - "I'm a very 'hyper' person, you know". Another time, I could not restrain myself from erupting into laughter (and I smile even as I write this) when, on a television documentary about French gastronomy, the very ‘Marseillais’ baker proudly shows his batch and says: ‘ça, eh bien ce sont des muffins!’. This last word was pronounced 'à la marseilleise', with a wonderfully nasalised final vowel. Once a word is borrowed, it needs to be attributed a phonetically and phonologically acceptable form. Two personal favorites of phonetic adaptation are the tennis call ‘out’ which, for most French people, is pronounced /ut/, and the second is the admittedly rarer ‘outsider’ which is pronounced by many as /autzajdœR/. When the word is accepted, the change often goes beyond the phonetic to the semantic, morphological or orthographical. Occasionally, part of the borrowed word is lost (truncation) to leave only a remnant of the original, hence a pullover becomes a ‘pull' and football becomes ‘foot’. Certain words are open to modification by adding suffixes to their root , such as – eur: 'basketteur, volleyeur' or - man: 'tennisman, rugbyman'. So not only do variations swiftly develop between the English use of the word and the French one, but recurrent English morphemes can be detached from their initial context and applied elsewhere. We also find words that do not exist in English but that are composed of English morphemes: 'alcootest, baby-foot, auto-stop'.

Having recently acquired satellite television, I clearly identified two areas where anglicisms were particularly abundant. The first was Internet-related terminology and the second was ‘extreme’ sports such as roller-skating and free-style skiing. My younger brother’s passion for the former sport helped me to realise the extent of English in the sport’s vocabulary. Nearly every single term, from the 'slide’ to the more complex ‘fishbrain’, includes some English. It is perhaps interesting to note that in the more respected but similar sport of ice-skating there are, as far as I know, very few English terms even though some of the moves (in particular the jumps) show resemblances to their terrestrial counterpart. This would support the claim that image contributes to the frequency and extent of lexical borrowing. There is, after all, a clear difference in register between ‘une double vrille bien effectuée’ and ‘une méchante three-sixty’. The latter goes hand in hand with the risible down-to-the-knees-see-my-underwear trousers worn by teenage 'bladers' and the former with the elegance and sophisticated image of ice-skating. They are more than signifiers but cultural symbols. The words therefore form an inherent part of the way the discipline is perceived. The very fact that Micheline Johnson’s book ‘English words in a teenage magazine’ contains more than 600 pages is, in itself, revealing. This leads us on to our next point, namely that of the young.

As would be expected, there are fewer anglicisms in ‘Le Monde’ (France’s most respected newspaper) than in a teenage magazine. Equally, few would deny that the ‘average’ adolescent uses a greater number of anglicisms than the average adult. This makes obvious the link between the use of English words and social perception. John Orr’s aforementioned comment: "L’anglais, ça fait sportif" thus extends far beyond the world of sport. It is the young who are the ones borrowing the largest part of the spoken anglicisms (scientific borrowings are less polemical, probably because they are encountered rarely by the public and are often ‘unenglish’ orthographically). The question one must ask is where do the young obtain the words. The majority of French teenagers do learn English at school but, speaking from personal experience, the teaching is still fairly conservative. It is conceivable that, for example, having learnt the word ‘truck’ in class, they incorporate it in a social context purely for linguistic variation or entertainment; so, say, on the way back from school one of the boys, upon seeing a particularly large vehicle, exclaims ‘ouaaah!, t’as vu cet hyper gros truck?’. ‘Truck’ being naturally pronounced with French consonants and with a particularly long vowel. And so, through a gradual process of diffusion, the word ‘truck’ is assimilated into the (teenage) language, with the meaning of ‘a snazzy-looking vehicle of generous proportions’. The important thing to note in this fictitious definition is the adjective qualifying the vehicle; in other words, the original meaning of the word has undergone a semantic shift. Such linguistic games have been witnesses before: ‘Verlans’ (an adolescent cryptolect which functions by the inversion of syllables, hence 'verlan' for 'l'envers') is still used extensively and so is word-abbreviation (e.g. 'alu' for 'aluminium', 'bonap' for 'bon appétit'). Indeed, language distortion for recreational purposes is almost universal among the older English independent (confusingly called 'public') schools, especially in the late 19^th, early 20^th century, and an interesting parallel can clearly be drawn between what happened then and what is happening now in France.

The French adolescent’s extensive use of English words serves as a means of differentiating himself from the rigidity of the adult world and as a reaffirmation of his adolescent status. In a recent article entitled 'VERLAN français, BACKSLANG anglais, etc.', F. Antoine writes of teenage slang:

It is supposed to be naturally cryptic: a device used to conceal the meaning of the words from other people. It is also, and perhaps above all, a tool to label and make distinct one's identity, used to notify one's belonging to a well-defined group…it is finally a kind of ludic expression, which is evidence to the joy of playing with words, of livening up the lexicon, its rules and conventions, of creating words with amusing sonorities, whose unusual character punctuates the discourse and fires the imagination.

The parallel is clear when one reads the following extract:

The public schools formed a distinct sector which operated as a de facto national system of secondary education…They thus had shared interests, above all the preservation of a distinct identity which helped to maintain their distance from the social groups inferior to those which patronised the public schools’ (my underlining)

Winchester College, one of England's oldest and most prestigious public schools (founded in the latter half of the fourteenth century) possesses a remarkable amount of 'in-words', called 'Notions'. In 1998, a Notions dictionary, consisting of over 300 pages, was published and made available to the public. Instances of ‘verlans’, truncation, and other types of word juggling are plentiful. These words, like many English words in France today, gained a favorable reputation and the school's scholars spent time creating new Notions with the hope that they would catch on. From the peak of Notions at the end of the last century (» 1000 words), we find that, at the time of writing, the average Wykehamist has a Notions lexicon of around 60 words.

The ones used today were thus chosen through a process of linguistic natural selection and are therefore unlikely to disappear since they are deeply rooted in the Wykehamist’s language. A. Borrell, in his 1986 article on the 'vocabulaire "jeune"', supports this: "It's as if they first 'taste' them, with their mouths as well as with their ears, to only keep the best. The neologism is pronounced, listened, then, if the result is convincing, it can be adopted." Like Notions, many of the newly borrowed English words will be out of the French language in a matter of years or even months. Only the ones that make a ‘true’ linguistic contribution will remain.

Let us now turn our attention to external factors that could explain the proliferation of borrowings.

One of the main ways English words are adopted by the public is by the press; Nicol Spence writes "the language of journalists and advertising agents is indeed strongly marked by anglicisms...many texts are written in an English-speaking environment". Spence attributes this to various factors such as ignorance and tiredness, or sometimes they simply introduce the English word as it is, either for a touch of ‘couleur locale’ or "simply because they like neologisms, wish to be up-to-date and couldn't care less about the norm".. Indeed, the norm is negatively perceived; to use the word ‘commanditaire’ instead of ‘sponsor’ would today be seen as totally unreasonable. With the advent of personal computers and the Internet, a forward-looking and technologically minded approach to life is required and this filters through in both spoken and written language. France has roughly half the number of Internet users than England has, but is currently undergoing an Internet boom. English's prominence on the Internet (95% of Internet pages are in English) will no doubt cause a sharp increase in borrowed words. After all, the more people are exposed to a foreign language, the deeper the influence it will have on their own. This will affect the language as a whole far more directly than the previously discussed ‘teen’ language which passes through four basic stages to encompass the entire population: 1) original word – adolescent, 2) adolescent – adolescent, 3) adolescent – adult, 4) adult- adult. Most of the new anglicisms currently in use by teenagers will not get beyond stage two. Only a handful will reach the final stage but the ones that do are likely to be permanent visitors. We can clearly see how the press (excluding the teenage press), by simply going from stage 1 to 4, can play a major part in the integration of a word in the population’s language. This is of course true of television; the subject of the next paragraph.

Television is undoubtedly the most effective language proliferator. It has been established, I believe, that the average Frenchman watches in excess of three hours of TV a day. The effect of TV on lexical borrowing can be either indirect or direct. As was argued earlier and summed up by the phrase ‘L’anglais, ça fait sportif’, anglicisms today are as concerned with the image they create than in filling the semantic holes of the French language. The link between English and trendiness/modernity can be traced, amongst other things, to the very high number of English and American films and soaps on the screens. Even when dubbed, the sole fact that the program is English-speaking plays a part in the creation of a particular image. The direct effect is self-explanatory. Very often, English words are left untranslated (I am not ashamed to say that I have compared French and American versions of the popular soap ‘Friends’). Considering the popularity of the said program, that untranslated word would inevitably catch on and, like an aroused bacterium, proliferate rapidly.

Television’s direct and indirect effects can also be applied to radio and popular music. Radio stations aimed at the 16-30 age group are avid users of both Verlans and anglicisms. As would be expected, the majority of the songs they play are in English. Unlike TV programs and magazine articles, songs are usually heard numerous times and their words often learnt by heart. Individual words or phrases from the song are then selected and used independently in a social context. Furthermore, the last few years have witnessed an increase in the popularity of rap and hip-hop in France and the nature of these musical forms lend themselves to the creation of anglicisms.

Although I have listed the main causes of borrowing as regards anglicisms in French, it would be wrong to ignore some of the less obvious ones. The channel tunnel and the country’s relative economic prosperity have resulted in an increase in journeys to England. Many schools now have regular trips to London and, in this period of high unemployment, more and more young people are moving to England in an attempt to find work. This closer relationship between the two countries is in part responsible for some of the recent borrowings.

The considerable linguistic influence of English on French is not a surprising fact. It is mainly the result of the country’s immersion in anglo-american culture and of the amount of exposure the majority of its inhabitants have to it. The image associated with the English language acts both as a catalyst and an incentive to lexical borrowing. Any language, unless completely isolated, will be susceptible to lexical borrowing. Purists should be referred to Michel Malherbe who reminds us that "The notion of language purity is unfounded; it is usually impossible to scientifically attribute a word to a given language, unless the word's first appearance is precisely attested." When educated Frenchman complain of an 'importation d'anglicismes', they are blissfully unaware of the origin of 'importation', a word borrowed from English at the end of the 18^th century. We are certain to see an increase in English loanwords in French, but it is unlikely that these words, however numerous, will alter the balance and nature of the original language. The new loanwords represent a minute proportion of the language’s lexicon and are, for the most part, ephemeral. They pose no threat since they lack the linguistic 'energy' needed to make any significant impact on the language’s core. In the conclusion of his article on adolescent language, A. Borrell, with a palpable mixture of trepidation and contemplation, writes "We are faced with a social phenomenon about which we need to think about". No amount of reflection will alter the present situation. Neither the profound pondering of the anxious scholar nor the tut-tutting of the outraged prescriptivist will alter the present situation. « C’est la vie ! » as we unashamedly say in English.

Daniel K. Sokol
Lycée Carcado-Saisseval
Paris

Born in France, educated at Oxford University (French and Linguistics), Mr Sokol currently teaches English at the Lycee Carcado-Saisseval, Paris, France. For more information on Mr. Sokol please visit his website at http://www.instantweb.com/a/anglais/menu.html .

Endnotes

i. The delightfully named 'Quick' is roughly the French equivalent to McDonald's. The fine was given for a violation of the official order of March 17, 1982.
ii. GUIRAUD, Pierre, "Les Mots Etrangers", Paris, P.U.F, 1965
iii. RAY-DEBOVE, J, "Effet des Anglicismes Lexicaux sur le Système du Français", Cahiers de Lexicologie. 51, 1987-2, p. 257
iv. POSNER, Rebecca, "Linguistic Change in French", New York, Oxford University Press, 1997
v. JOHNSON, Micheline, "Les Mots Anglais dans un Magazine de Jeunes" , Cahiers de Lexicologie. 51, 1987-2
vi. DE SAUSSURE, Ferdinand, "Cours de Linguistique Générale", Ed. Payot, 1913, p. 160
vii. ORR, John, "Les Anglicismes du Vocabulaire Sportif" in "Le Français Moderne", III, 1935
viii. ANTOINE, Fabrice, "VERLAN français, BACKSLANG anglais, etc., Cah. Lexicol. 74, 1999-1, p. 171
ix. STRAY, Christopher, "Saying One's Thing: Dialect and Idiolect at Winchester", STET RES, Online. January 1999, http://www.winchester.simplenet.com/winchester-featurearticle.html
x. See STEVENS, Charles "Winchester College Notions - The English Dialect of Winchester College", ed. Christopher Stray, London, Athlone Press, 1998.
xi. BORRELL, A., 'Le Vocabulaire "Jeune", le Parler "Branché", Création et/ou récréation lexicale?', Cah.Lexicol. 48, 1986 - 1, 71
xii. SPENCE, Nicol, "Le Français Contemporain: Etudes et Discussions.", Munich, Fink, 1976
xiii. MALHERBE, Michel, "Les Langages de l'Humanité", Paris, Robert Laffont, 1997, p. 90

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