The French (or rather, the Parisian) zealotry with language purity was always absolutely incomprehensible to me. All languages are bastardized versions of another one. Most are the byproduct of nationalistic fervor, an imposition mandated by the state on the populace in order to create a "single nation".
France's attitude to her language is IMHO marred by deep hypocrisy and a backward, reactionary worldview of "preservation" of something that for most is just a tool.
Languages live, evolve, and die. We should cherish and try to save as many as we can while giving people the tools to communicate with as many other humans as possible. It's crucial to stop languages from getting extinct, but that cannot mean that nationalistic chauvinism should be tolerated. Languages, especially smaller ones, are incredibly powerful echo chambers.
To conclude, it's ironic that France tries so hard to keep French "pure" (from what, I ask myself) when France is one of the worst offenders regarding the utter hostility it has shown multiple times against the linguistic rights of minorites and regional languages.
France lost any moral justification to "preserve her national language" when she failed to ratify the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.
One only has to understand the history of France itself. The French language itself and "French identity" is the sole unifying factor tieing together a plethora of distinct cultures and languages that you recognize today as being part of France.
Consider that in addition to French, you will also find the following spoken languages: Arabic, Norman, Picard, Poitevin-Saintongeais, Franco-Provencal, Occitan, Catalan, Auvergnat, Corsican, Basque, French Flemish, Lorraine Franconian, Alsatian, and Breton.
The idea behind fighting to protect the French language is to protect the unifying institution binding these groups of people together in a harmonious society.
France is a melting pot and the government defines France as an inclusive nation with universal values -- advocating assimilation through which immigrants are expected to adhere to French values and cultural norms.
Speaking the French language and declaring yourself to be French is what counts. The government thus has an interest in defining exactly what being French is. French citizens still equate their nationality with citizenship as does French law.
France is historically much more uniform than countries like Italy, Spain or the United Kingdom. To give you an example of the Italian language diversity, I don’t understand my mother’s dialect and she was born 30 kilometres from where I was.
France having to defend French because it is a melting pot is a fantasy. The Parisian intellectual elite, in lack of a better expression, has a weird fixation on language tradition and a strong contempt for the English language.
Yes, the concept of nationalism and national language is a modern phenomenon. It is helpful in having subjects treat their governments as correct and moral by default and develop a distrust of their neighbors.
Noam chomsky has an informative interview. He seems to think the concept of guardianship of a "pure" language is conceptually silly https://youtu.be/hdUbIlwHRkY
The quality of spoken French goes lower years after years. The generation before me spoke a much better French than my generation even if we are supposed to be better educated. The same goes for the generations after mine.
Most speakers on TV, most journalists and even school teachers are using a small vocabulary (to be better understood?) and they make gross errors. Commonly they are using the wrong gender ("le porte", "le vis"). Most of the time they discuss in a "meta language" that has no meaning ("la météo va s'intensifier", "les prix augmentent à cause de l'inflation").
Many school teachers have not a good understanding of French grammar.
The quality of spoken English goes down over time as well, and as far as I know the English language has no institute or governing body which attempts to regulate it. It seems to me that the languages erode regardless of the rules in place to become more convenient for people. It is a shame culturally but at the same time it is difficult to blame people for speaking conveniently. It will be interesting to see where this takes both languages in 50 to 100 years.
Why is it a shame culturally? What values are you using to establish that one form of the language is "good" or "pure" and another is "worse" or "eroded" and why should others subscribe to that value system?
Languages change and always have, people noting this is as old as written record about language. People have also always been complaining about it, and ascribing to it some meaning about the increasing degeneracy of the youth or the decline of society or whatever.
The language obviously continues to work fine for the needs people have of it, as it always has. You don't need to like the changes, but you should understand that that is an aesthetic judgement and nothing else. It doesn't indicate or represent anything "going down" or a cultural loss of any kind.
I can agree with this line of thought, however, I feel obliged to warn you where this supposed reality can lead and I want you to consider if this violates any other beliefs you may hold. Another poster mentioned that the English have a rather strong dislike of prescriptivism, I think this is true, although I only have anecdotal evidence for this. Following this I find that the English and there derivatives in America also have a strong belief in multiculturalism, or the idea that varying cultures/perspectives strengthens a group. I would say that in certain intervals these two cannot coexist. Taking the example of french Canadians, they are considered to be relatively intolerant compared to the rest of Canada when it comes to religion, culture, language, immigration, and other facets of multiculturalism in an attempt to protect themselves. Yet it was that same multiculturalist mindset that saved them when the English let off and accepted them into Canadian goverment, giving them many rights even above the rest of Canada. So you can see that the lack of defence against cultural change inevitably results in another culture with a more defensive nature taking ground... But if you attempt to fight back it wouldn't be multicultural of you... So you can see that these two beliefs conflict at certain extremes. Karl Popper would have considered this to be an example of the paradox of tolerance (And I would add intolerance, as too much language purity gets you into a situation where your parisian institute bans the word poggers).
With this in mind I find your purely relativistic idea that all languages are equal, or more importantly that we should treat them as all equal, as somewhat misguided, and in many ways supremacist (it is easy for the culturally dominant, in this case the english, to wave hands and act like everyone else is irrational for trying to protect their culture, when it is implicitly understood if they don't then English will swallow it whole).
If this was a valid argument than Modern English is also a rump language which was vandalized by countless French and Latin loanwords and that lost its grammatical correctness when people stopped conjugating verbs and using grammatical genders.
Old English was a way more complex language, akin to German and had a different form for each person. For instance, to shine was "sċīnan", and the present tense was
- ic sċīne
- þū sċīnst
- hē sċīnþ
...
Nowadays, it's just "I shine, you shine, he shines", without no distinction except the third person's 's'. It's a vastly simpler language, and yet, it allows people to convey concepts as well as any other language.
A thing I find ironic is that in certain languages that do thoroughly conjugate verbs, there's a way to mock those foreigners who don't know how to use verbs properly. It often happens that those who lack the knowledge of the proper inflected forms use the infinitive everywhere as a stopgap - for instance, one may say in broken Italian "io avere freddo" instead of the proper "io ho freddo", and every Italian speaker would understand it perfectly, albeit a native speaker would probably scoff it off as a blatant sign of a lack of linguistic knowledge.
That's precisely what English went through during the transition from Old to Middle English. People started speaking "broken" English and they kept doing that, and after a while it wasn't broken anymore. Subjunctive tense? That's basically dead in modern English too.
The point I'm trying to convey is, what you consider as the rules nowadays come straight from the broken babblings of the illiterates of yesteryear. If those Roman scholars that were complaining about the broken Latin spoken by their contemporaries had their way, the Romance languages would have never existed. Ironically, the moment Europe dropped Latin and started adopting the "vulgar" actually languages spoken by the people is widely considered the moment Europe truly started blooming again, and a crucial first step towards the literacy of the masses.
Language naturally evolve over time in a way which allows efficient communication, so it's not something which should be controlled. The simpler a language is the greater number of people it will be able to be understood by.
The whole purpose of any language is facilitate communication between people. I would argue that the quality and usefulness of English has increased over time, as it would be very difficult to use English from even 100 years ago in conversation today, as it would lack the words to express every day topics.
I think that French language going down the drain is due to English words being used instead of perfectly valid french equivalent. People use English word to sound snobbish and smart, knowing that older people do not master English.
So I support the ban as it tries to lower the bullshit
It's funny because certain middle class people speaking English often throw in French or Italian words in the same way to sound clever! I'm not offended by it, as English borrows words from many other languages anyway.
I guess I must belong to the plebe as I fail to see what's wrong with this one: "les prix augmentent à cause de l'inflation". It feels a bit middle-schoolish but grammatically not wrong to me.
One I truly can't stand nowadays is "ça fait sens", and I keep hearing it. Seriously...
It's been said that if you want your news broadcast, news web post, or social media post to be read you have to write it at the fifth grade level (American English equivalents here). Write at too high a language, too many big words, etc, people won't read as it's too hard. That's the problem with "middle-school is" language, if no one uses it most ownt learn it. It's tends to keep the vocabulary small, or at least that's the idea behind a lot of this in English language spaces, I can see the same argument for others.
So you state rightfully that Parisian suppressed regional language (my grandmother and father were not allowed to speak alsatian at school), but you are using it to support the use of English? Why should we make amends to English? Why not reviving regional language, try to bolster their use? I don't know, we could impose that all adverts and documents are shown on french and regional language. Because now, I only see English everywhere and I'm really pissed off
I support the right of people to speak whatever and however they want. If people want to speak English, just let them. Languages are tools, they are not pieces of art to be kept around for your own amusement, they are not religious texts dictated from a higher power. They are something that arises from the people for the sake of the people themselves.
French, Italian, Spanish came about when Latin got corrupted and hybridized with other languages, changing its sounds and evolving together with the people that spoke them.
English itself is basically 30% French - and yet it's still English, isn't it? Loanwords are just what they are - loanwords. In the end, the end goal is to be understood, and to understand those that speak to you, and if a loanword expresses a concept in a way that's more broadly understood and universally recognized (i.e., "computer"), why should people reject it?
The whole concept of "language purity" is just a silly show of chauvinism, a "fear" of contamination from foreign influence that ignores the fact that all languages are artificial constructs. Most national languages have been born out of coercion and nationalism, and only in recent times they have been "standardized". Most languages are basically just the dialect of the capital, that for some queer reason was picked to be the most noble of them all.
Knowing English is crucial and its teaching should be of paramount importance because it has become the lingua franca of the modern world. It's the koiné that allows people from various backgrounds and various places to communicate. It allows people to cut intermediaries and learn from each other, directly, what other parts of the world have to say, removing from governments and national media the ability to spin things around.
I know lots of people that only know Italian, and thus only know what the Italian media wants to talk about, or cares about. Local languages quickly become a way to gatekeep people, and cut them out of the source of global discussion about topics and ideas.
I personally think that languages should be taught and preserved, because every single language you know gives you a different outlook on life, things, and concepts. Every tongue has its set of things it cares about, its own history, its own value, and everyone should be bilingual to truly understand that there's a wider world outside of their small garden. We cannot, however, allow this to hamper the progress we've made in understanding each other. We should always keep our mother tongue close to us, without forgetting what languages are for.
But for context the ministry has absolutely no bearing on French as real life people actually speak it. This is a body of people whose power is essentially just to maintain the government’s language style guide and issue strongly worded letters to a herd of cats who largely ignore them. So while this is technically a ban when it comes to government correspondence it could be the poster child for sensationalizing a headline.
This sort of thing is already active in Quebec, Canada, though. And it has legal teeth in the province. Even the ratio of area taken by English and French words on a bilingual sign is policed.
I used to work in an Ontario tobacco farming town (English), and lots of French folks would hitchhike into town to get summer priming jobs. The term "Les chips" for potato chips was really common, but on French and bilingual labels you must use the word Croustilles. That's just one example of very many.
There was damn near a panic when Contact Lenses became a commonly purchased item, because there was no French word for them. Eventually they came up with one, and you no longer hear "Le Contactlens."
The point isn't that they have or eventually have official French words for things. Its that regardless of what the actual people call it (les chips) amongst themselves, it is illegal to put that on a French product label or sign. They will literally shut you down for not being French enough if the hefty fines don't work.
When contact lenses came about, for the longest time there was no French word, so Quebec folk just called it by the English name because nobody knew what the official word would finally be.
Quebec has a literal Language Police. Here's an article about them harassing restaurants for writing too many English-only Facebook posts, and employing people who don't speak French well enough.
It's interesting to compare this to Japan's relationship with foreign loanwords - an estimated 10% of modern Japanese comes from English [1]. The government occasionally makes noises about reining the use of foreign-derived words in official documents, but there are so many things and concepts for which a borrowed word is the only word known to most speakers using "pure" Japanese would only be more confusing.
I think is good if they can make up words in the language (whether it is French, English, Latin, Japanese, or something else) that they do not already have it, but only if they do not force everyone to use it. It should be by your choice only.
(Even many words in English is French. You can also write in English without French words, but that also should be only if you choose to do; they shouldn't make everyone to do so even if they do not want to do. And in French, if you want to write only French words, or also English and others, it is only if you choose to do so and they shouldn't make you to do so if you do not want to do.)
If the government wants to use French words even if they are not that common, then they can use the words that they want to use. They even look to see if there are already French words, so that is good, compared with not doing so. But, they should not force everyone else to do even against their choice.
It sounds like you are interested in Poul Anderson's "Ander-Saxon" english text that uses no borrowed words: French, Latin or Greek for example. Very strange but readable and really makes it clear how modern English is a melange of languages.
For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life.
Oh, sweet, sweet irony from the British medias. How dare we keep our linguistic identity and not surrender to THEIR language in day to day conversations? I guess they surely would rejoice giving up English and using French if the roles were reversed, wouldn't they?
Interestingly, I've noticed a trend here to use English words or expressions to pimp various meetings, although the terms are often used out of context and act as a decoy to hide some lack of field knowledge, or downright language skills.
Ironically, the more English words they tend to use, the less is their ability to sustain a fluent conversation in English. When I communicate in English at least I try to make an effort not to sprinkle French words everywhere. I also do the same in French, and I'd rather not bastardize the language further.
What is wrong with loan-words in your mind? English takes a great many loan words from French without worrying about it. It's a natural part of language evolution that we embrace. It hasn't threatened the identity of English yet.
Nothing wrong with loan-words. It becomes a problem though when it becomes linguistic and/or cultural imperialism (trying to undermine various cultures and languages through a more dominant one). French Canada could say a few things about that.
Well, granted, English and French have a special history as they both invaded countless countries to the point those two languages eventually became spoken on all continents. I guess it's only fair when it backfires sometimes, and there's a bit of irony when it happens between those two languages in particular.
The first such invasion in the last millenia was that of England by the French Normans (themselves having been invaded only a generation before by Danish pagans), where French language was loosely imposed across the lands for several centuries, leading to the English we have today, majorly comprised of French loan words.
As a mostly english speaking Canadian, I have a pile of french and german words pushing into my vocabulary. I never felt the word Kindergarten was pushed into my diction. It just works.
My CV or Resume speaks for itself. :)
I don't really view these as borrowed words. They are just words.
Just the same, I don't get upset when I spell colour without the U, when I program.
I find is super odd that a country that gave us free speech spends so much time working on a way to police the words their people use.
I'm sure television news did that. The TV News accent is so uniform across the board that even the Canadian accent is hard to distinguish on some stations. Well, you still can, but when we listen to old broadcasts, that Canadian accent freaks a lot of us oot.
We're inching closer and closer to the full-blown CNN accent on Canadian TV news.
Incidentally I was amused to discover that people on the west coast actually often do say "oot and aboot." Until a couple decades ago, I thought it was a myth.
Micromanaging regulations that make business difficult (beyond comparable social democracies) is a quintessential aspect of French cultural heritage, so this move is purity-preserving in a meta sense as well.
France's attitude to her language is IMHO marred by deep hypocrisy and a backward, reactionary worldview of "preservation" of something that for most is just a tool.
Languages live, evolve, and die. We should cherish and try to save as many as we can while giving people the tools to communicate with as many other humans as possible. It's crucial to stop languages from getting extinct, but that cannot mean that nationalistic chauvinism should be tolerated. Languages, especially smaller ones, are incredibly powerful echo chambers.
To conclude, it's ironic that France tries so hard to keep French "pure" (from what, I ask myself) when France is one of the worst offenders regarding the utter hostility it has shown multiple times against the linguistic rights of minorites and regional languages.
France lost any moral justification to "preserve her national language" when she failed to ratify the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.