The Story of French

by Jean-Benoit Nadeau

  Strangely, nobody has dared to challenge the accord rule in order to simply make all participles agree with the subject. This is all the more surprising since the problem of agreement of participles pops up in regular use much more than the complicated passé simple does—and francophones did away with that. The reason no one has challenged the accord rule is probably that most participles in agreement, even if they are written differently, are pronounced the same way in conversation. That makes it easy for francophones to hide their ignorance. “Je les ai voulues” and “Je les ai voulu” sound exactly the same. But it’s a different matter in writing. Why have so few writers dared challenge the existing rule? They are probably afraid of looking ignorant or illiterate.

  (We are toying with the idea of doing away with the agreement-of-participle nonsense in the French edition of this book. We will probably have to negotiate this as part of our publishing contract and include an explicit warning to our readers about the change. Even then, we may not overcome resistance from our editors.)

  Though French has undergone—and is still undergoing—some significant changes in pronunciation and grammar, neither of these topics attracts nearly as much commentary as the appearance of new words does. New vocabulary and new definitions of existing words are the most visible and spectacular evidence that French is changing. Even foreigners with very little command of French comment on them.

  But in a way, new words are the least significant of the changes happening in the language. Vocabulary and definitions shift all the time. A 1976 study of words in the authoritative Larousse dictionary showed that, between 1949 and 1960, French dictionaries modified one entry in seven, by changing definitions or by replacing words with others. There is no reason to believe that this process has either slowed down or accelerated in recent years. Dictionaries simply have a limited number of pages, and editors are forced to shed obsolete words in order to make room for new ones. One difference is that while borrowings among international languages used to come from varied sources, now most come from English. That makes them more noticeable, but not necessarily more numerous, nor a bigger threat.

  For that matter, words that disappear aren’t necessarily gone forever. Before the 1960s the word obsolète was itself regarded as obsolete. It reappeared in French most likely because the same term was being used in English. Sometimes the source of the “re-entry” words is documented; for instance, Charles de Gaulle, a very well-read statesman, was notorious for dragging archaic terms such as quarteron (small band) out of obscurity for his speeches. In many cases, however, the source remains obscure. One of the great curiosities of French slang in the 1990s was the reappearance of the world maille (dough, in the sense of money, a meaning that dates back to the Middle Ages).

  The language used in les cités is an important source of new vocabulary. The main form of jargon is a word-crunching system called verlan, whose origins date back to the seventeenth century. Verlan has been popular in France’s suburbs since the 1970s. It consists of reversing syllables and writing them phonetically; the term itself is verlan for à l’envers (in reverse). It has produced one of the most interesting expressions of the political landscape in France: les beurs, verlan for rab, the Arabic term for Arabs, referring to French of North African descent.

  The jargon of the cités is evolving constantly and regularly entering mainstream usage, often through publicity. Suburban kids don’t speak of français but rather céfran. The beurs who make it to the middle class are now called les beurgeois. A femme (woman) is meuf, a flic (cop) is keuf, mère (mother) is reum, père (father) is reup and a prof (teacher) is a frop. Verlan goes as far as reverlanizing its terms, so that Arabs, first beurs, have become rebeus, and femmes, first meufs, have become feums. Comme ça (like that) was first verlanized as comme aç, then as askeum, and then as asmeuk.

  Verlan is closely associated with another popular form of argot called tchatche, which is strongly influenced by Arabic. The word tchatcher comes from Algerian argot and means to chat—itself a derivation of the Spanish chacharear. Some tchatche terms, including the word tchatche itself, have made it into mainstream French. A famous example is niquer, derived from Algerian slang for fuck. Although the words that make it into mainstream French are mostly of Arabic origin, Wolof, the principal language of Senegal, has contributed words such as gorette (woman), while Malian contributed intourie (you’re crazy).

  The use of French slang (whether argot, tchatche or verlan) is, of course, controversial in a language culture that is strongly normative. Purists consider it linguistic garbage, while linguists and artists tend to see it as a great source of creativity. Linguist Henriette Walter argues that rather than being a sign of the degeneration of French, the wordplay inherent in these slangs demonstrates a highly developed taste in vocabulary and great mastery of expression in its users. Some of the terms used in contemporary argot are truly stunning. Around 2000 a new term for a cop appeared: kisdé, an abbreviation of celui qui s’déguise (the guy in disguise). One of the most comical, picked up by linguist Jean-Pierre Goudaillier, was the expression barre-toi (get out of here), which was verlanized into barre-oit and then transformed into…Barry White!

  Language commentators may not like argot terms like these, but they certainly can’t hail them as evidence that the vocabulary of the French is becoming impoverished. On the contrary, young people use more words, not fewer. They speak in two registers: mainstream French (at school) and verlan or other argots on their own. In one situation they might say “J’aime beaucoup son rap” (“I like his rap”) and in another, “J’kiffe grave son rap.”

  Argot is not going to show up in the Academy’s dictionary any time soon, but commercial dictionaries such as Le Robert and Larousse include terms that have entered the Parisian mainstream. For example, more than forty words are being used in French for money, including fric, pognon, grisby and thune. Things don’t just brûlent (burn) anymore, they crament. And when it’s cold, ça caille. “C’est la galère” (“It’s a grind”—from the word galley, or slave ship) has produced the verb galérer (to struggle), which in turn produced the noun galérien (unemployed). This expression has even been verlanized into lèrega. Someone learning French at the Alliance française in New York City is unlikely to learn such terms, but that doesn’t make them any less a part of mainstream French. Many of these words and expressions have even been in use for three or four generations.

  Not surprisingly, artists, musicians, writers and poets have always been more open and attuned to new words and expressions than have the general population or even teachers. In the 1970s, popular singer Renaud made history by releasing the first record with a verlan title, Laisse béton, verlan for laisse-tomber (drop it). Some authors, including Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Raymond Queneau, have based much of their literary creativity on this popular linguistic register. Queneau famously opened his novel Zazie dans le métro with the line “Doukipudonctan?,” a phonetic rendition of “D’où qu’i’ pue donc tant?” or “Where does he stink that much from?” This example, which dates from 1959, shows that text-only phonetic jargon is nothing new and that today’s language commentators are a bit hasty to pin the responsibility for it on teenagers. One of the craziest wordsmiths of the French language was author Frédéric Dard, better known under the name of his main character and narrator, San-Antonio, whose language was completely loose, mixing argot and regional forms of all kinds with his own inventions. Dart, who sold two hundred million copies of his novels over his lifetime, is believed to have created no fewer than ten thousand French words and expressions.

  Today French teenagers may speak of a girl’s balcon (balcony) or her châssis (chassis). The terms may not be in the best of taste, but they get the idea across. Of course, expressions like these offend schoolteachers, parents and purists of all kinds, who often don’t understand them. But that should be no surprise. Such variations are specifically designed to be subversive, if not seditious; teenagers don’t want teachers and paren
ts to understand them. To some extent, this kind of rebelliousness is predictable when a group of conservative purists pretend to “control” French. But not all linguists buy the purist line. Gérald Antoine, editor of the twenty-sixth volume of the Histoire de la langue française, for one, claims that the French language “has never had this many poets!”

  Borrowings from English are, of course, another important source of new vocabulary in French. The phenomenon was quite minor until the 1920s, but since then, thousands of English words have entered French usage. Anglophones who visit Paris (or Montreal for that matter) are often surprised—some pleased, some disappointed—to see how very present English words and expressions are, especially in publicity. But while English words provoke strong reactions from everyone, they probably don’t pose as grave a threat to French as most people assume they do, especially in France. A study showed that in a newspaper such as Le Monde only one word in 166 was actually a borrowing. Linguists have demonstrated that less than one percent of French speech is composed of such borrowings.

  The main reason that English words are not a threat is that most are either fully integrated into French or swiftly abandoned. According to linguist Françoise Gadet, most borrowings from English are either Frenchified within a decade or fall into disuse. In 1964 French critic René Étiemble wrote a scathing pamphlet called Parlez-vous franglais? (Do You Speak Frenglish?), meant to warn his compatriots against the growing number of English words seeping into their language. Twenty years later, hundreds of the English words he used as examples had already gone out of style and were no longer being used (he subsequently argued that this was the effect of his book).

  The few linguists who do cross-linguistic comparison point out that French is never affected by anglicisms as much as German or Italian is. When French speakers like an English concept, they tend to make it their own very quickly. In some cases a French alternative is proposed, such as informatique for computer science or baladeur for Walkman. A computer bug became un bogue, which produced a series of derivatives: boguer, déboguer and débogage. From football, Le Monde journalists have produced le foot, but also footeux (football amateur), footophile (a fan), footocratie and even footballistoïde (footballistic-ish). In Quebec the drug universe borrowed faire un trip, which has since spawned the variations triper (trip), tripant (cool) and tripatif (exciting). But these terms are now so fully French that they must be retranslated using unrelated English terms. Many English borrowings are not of vocabulary but of meaning—people speak of réaliser in the sense of to understand when it used to mean to make. Compétition in the English sense has been added to the French sense of contest. Opportunité, which used to mean strictly timeliness, has been extended to include the notion of occasion (as in having the occasion, or opportunity, to meet someone). But even when new meanings are added to previous ones, they don’t erase the old ones.

  Science, invention, industry, fashion, other technical fields and trends are bringing English words into French at a rapid pace. French has appropriated scan and transformed it into the forms scanneur and scannage. The popular appeal or “cool factor” of English (which we discuss in chapter 19) has been so powerful in France since the Second World War that people have even created faux English terms such as footing (walking), lifting (facelift) and pressing (drycleaning), words that have no relation to their real meaning in English (the way that déjà-vu and potpourri don’t mean the same thing in French as in English; double entendre doesn’t even exist in French). In other words, even though they sound English, they are French.

  Bernard Cerquiglini, former director of the Délégation générale de la langue française et des langues de France (DGLFLF), who now teaches at Louisiana State University Baton Rouge, thinks that the threat of English words to French is overdramatized. “Many English expressions enter French because they are fashionable and fall out of use when they are no longer fashionable. French speakers used to use the expression ‘smart’ to refer to someone who was well-dressed, but now they don’t use it any more than English speakers do.” Ironically, to the extent that the French are adopting English words, Cerquiglini thinks language purism is to blame. “When you force students to write the old-fashioned auparavant (before) instead of the more popular avant, or when you forbid them to speak of their computers qui se plantent (crash), they end up turning to English. We have to get rid of this conservatism. Why should English have the privilege of describing modernity?”

  Cerquiglini is certainly accurate when speaking about a conservative force that is working against changes in French. But non–French speakers are mistaken in thinking that purism is limited to a single identifiable group. The fact is, almost all francophones have a quasi-superstitious belief in the existence of a perfect normative French—mainly, but not only, in writing. Francophones’ fierce attachment to the norme shows up in their sustained fascination with grammar and spelling contests. Although the famous literary journalist Bernard Pivot ended his televised Dico D’Or dictation contest in 2005, French publisher Albin Michel sells collections of Pivot’s best dictations. In 2000, academician Erik Orsenna sold no fewer than a million copies of two books titled La grammaire est une chanson douce (Grammar Is a Sweet Song) and Les chevaliers du subjonctif (The Knights of the Subjunctive).

  Although purism is, to some extent, a religion or an ideology that unites French speakers, like any religion it has its fundamentalists and its moderates; hence the appearance of various “camps.” Non-purists are in fact better described as realists. They believe in the norme, but they acknowledge that French is changing, and even embrace that change.

  The strange thing is, though the hardcore purists represent only a minute proportion of francophones, they have always set the terms of the debate over French. The basis of their position is the claim that, for centuries now, the French language has been “fixed,” and therefore it can’t change. By idealizing this fixed French, purists identify any evidence of change as a decline in standards. Almost all francophones buy into this slightly circular reasoning about French’s fixedness, at least to a degree. The result has been the creation of a huge class of amateur linguists—journalists, public figures and other commentators—who may not be real purists but who perpetuate the agenda of the purists, sometimes with stunningly contradictory proclamations. For instance, journalists will pin the blame for new words and novelties in French on “youth,” claiming they do not know how to write anymore. Meanwhile, other writers and self-proclaimed language experts will blame the journalists themselves for setting a bad example by using casual language in their writing.

  The basis for the fundamentalists’ claim that French is declining is rather hard to substantiate, to say the least. If the general population of francophones are making more fautes than they used to—and this has not really been proven—it’s because that population is larger than ever before. As for those who used to write well, the well-educated and the lettrés, there is no reason to believe that they write any worse today than they did in the past. Reliable data on long-term changes is hard to find, but the few studies on the topic suggest that the number of mistakes people make today is pretty comparable to the number they made in 1900. In 1987 the linguists André Chervel and Danièle Manesse gave dictation to a group of schoolchildren. The text of the dictation was one found in the archives of the City of Paris that was given to three thousand schoolchildren of comparable age, gender and social class between 1873 and 1877. The old copies had been kept in the records, so the linguists could make a thorough comparison based on hard evidence. They found that not much had changed.

  The real question is: How do the purists keep their sway over the masses of French speakers, even outside France? The answer is that almost all francophones today believe in a sort of golden age of French, a time when everyone who spoke French knew how to conjugate the passé simple and could spontaneously coin French rhymes (while nibbling pastries at the Marquise’s salon….) They imagine that time to be the era of Louis XIV,
the second half of the seventeenth century. Perhaps they have been watching too many period films. At any rate, it’s pure fiction.

  In the supposed golden age of French, the time of Louis XIV, three-quarters of French people could not speak French fluently, if at all. Among those who did, only a fraction spoke “pure” French. The rest undoubtedly spoke with great variation and approximations. French literary icons such as Rabelais, Corneille, Descartes, Racine, Montaigne and Molière wrote French with the undefined spellings of their century and in the spirit of their time—that is, very casually, with plenty of what would be considered fautes only a century later. In fact, a careful examination of various editions of the French Academy’s dictionary shows that half of French words have changed spelling at least once—sometimes two or three times—since 1694. As we showed in chapter 8, publishers updated the classics to nineteenth-century standards during the great wave of purism that followed the introduction of universal schooling in France. As we said in chapter 8, the result of this gigantic revisionist enterprise was that most francophones today—even the best-read—swear that the geniuses of the past wrote in the standard modern French they themselves learned at school in the twentieth century. This belief, in turn, perpetuates the purist stance that French is fixed and should never change.