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As a french guy, I sense some kind of disdain for the Académie Française that I don't really get. The evolution of the french language is not dictated by the Ac

As a french guy, I sense some kind of disdain for the Académie Française that I don't really get. The evolution of the french language is not dictated by the Académie, but rather by its use by the french people, and the role of the Académie is merely to decide what should or shouldn't be set in stone in the dictionary. And in fact the usage of the french language is quite diverse, even in France. You can have regional variation in words even in metropolitan France, but if you take into account oversea territories like french polynesia, Guyana or Mayotte it gets even more complicated. So yes, convenient english words that are widely used by french people on a day-to-day basis are not added right away in the dictionary and in fact the Académie is actively trying to find french equivalent for them that are coherent with the etymology of the french language, but it doesn't prevent french people from using them. So I get that the immortals don't represent the french society and the never have. But they do not really have any kind of political impact on the country, the are just the bookkeepers of the français.

msla 8y ago
> As a french guy, I sense some kind of disdain for the Académie Française that I don't really get. The evolution of the french language is not dictated by the Académie, but rather by its use by the french people, and the role of the Académie is merely to decide what should or shouldn't be set in stone in the dictionary. But deciding what the prestige dialect is is inherently classist and racist, and reifying that classism and racism into a body composed of rich old White people just rubs everyone's noses in it. It's one thing to say "Your dialect is wrong because some amorphous entity says it is" and quite another to say "Your dialect is wrong because this specific group of old people says it is".
- gerard2 8y ago
  Well nobody is saying that any language is wrong or not. It's just that the french language is kind of an international standard and some people must decide how this standard should adapt with the evolution of the world. But the decision they make are not arbitrary decisions based on their personal feelings, they are guided by the etymology of french.
  - onli 8y ago
    > some people must decide how this standard should adapt with the evolution of the world Actually, no. Neither English, Spanish nor German have a dedicated powerful centralized institution that makes those decisions for the language, and I guess Chinese doesn't either? > But the decision they make are not arbitrary decisions based on their personal feelings, they are guided by the etymology of french. French differs strongly from other languages in how current developments are integrated, think ordinateur, portable and not having a word for uploading stuff. They might be guided by some principle, but it leads French being an artificial and very strange language that's hard to learn and differs more than necessary, from English especially.
    - kuschku 8y ago
      German actually has the Rat der Deutschen Sprache which is exactly this and makes exactly these decisions. As do many other languages. The latest change they made was introducing the capital ẞ.
      - bhaak 8y ago
        No, it doesn't if you mean with "exactly these decisions" that it also decides what words are considered officially part of the language. You also got the name wrong. It's "Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung" (Council for German Orthography) and that is exactly what they do. They standardize on the orthography. Nothing more.
    - gerard2 8y ago
      Ahah, what the hell are you talking about. Here is a very hidden list, found on an obscure website, that you might want to look into : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators
      - bhaak 8y ago
        This list doesn't say what scope those regulators have. I only know the situation for German and there the "Council for German Orthography" only regulates orthography not language and word usage, so take this list with a grain of salt.
- dorfsmay 8y ago
  The idea is to sit back and make choices that make sense when there is a conflict or that are more aligned with the rest if the language, and avoid messes like "biweekly".
  - benj111 8y ago
    Or "inflammable". Or "Aural" and "Oral" Or Ox > Oxen, Fox > Foxes
    - raverbashing 8y ago
      None of those are accidents, or maybe all of those are accidents, like it is mostly common in languages
      - benj111 8y ago
        Define accident. None of them seem particularly well thought out, or planned.
        raverbashing 8y ago
        > None of them seem particularly well thought out, or planned. The question is: is anything planned? People don't even use the correct possessive version of 'it' on the internet. Ox became Oxen because the plural 'en' was the productive plural construction at the time, and it made more sense than writing 'Oxes'. For the other words there might have been a historical reason (or just no reason at all) for it.
        benj111 8y ago
        French is kind of planned, that's why we're having this conversation.
        raverbashing 8y ago
        "Formal French" is planned, but the language goes on without it. For example, the AF is oblivious to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verlan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verlan (unless a word there ends hitting common usage) > Some verlan words, such as meuf, have become so commonplace that they have been included in the Petit Larousse[3] and a doubly "verlanised" version was deemed necessary, so the singly verlanised meuf became feumeu; similarly, the verlan word beur, derived from arabe, has become accepted into popular culture such that it has been re-verlanised to yield rebeu
- coldtea 8y ago
  >But deciding what the prestige dialect is is inherently classist and racist It's only deemed so by a classist and racist prejudice (that judges other cultures by its own values and metrics to boot). There's nothing "high class" about caring for language. People of all classes can and do root for the French language and Académie's role with it (and vice versa). The idea that "poor people couldn't possibly agree with high standards of language" -- as if poor implies some kind of inferior intellect, or less concern with such things as use of language, arts, etc, is classist itself. >It's one thing to say "Your dialect is wrong because some amorphous entity says it is" and quite another to say "Your dialect is wrong because this specific group of old people says it is". They don't want "amorphous entities" in them here parts. They believe in people, scholars and artists with proven track record that are deemed worthy to be guards of the language and art (which also tends to make them "old", which in matters of experience is prudent. They don't want people eager to bring the "next hot thing" and "fad du jour" in, but people that have seen things, and are blasé about empty novelties). Also, France has historically been a predominantly "white" nation, as were the people who shaped the language in the first place, so by representation it makes sense most of Académie to be white (it includes people of Chinese, Haitian, etc ethnical origins too). Despite that, France has a much better track record for how it treats its blacks, to have the finger pointed at them by Americans.
- gerard2 8y ago
  I don't know if the Academie is racist, but one of the most famous immortals is Leopold Sedar Senghor, a Senegalese poet and politician, elected in 1983. Only 20 years after the end of the segregation in the US.
- fifnir 8y ago
  You know what rubs MY nose? When people misuse language and then treat any correction as something snobby. Typical argument from someone who just wrote "could of", or mixed you're with your: "Oh but language is to communicate, and you understood what I'm saying so it worked so stop being snobby about it" gah, makes my blood boil
  - umanwizard 8y ago
    You haven’t explained what’s actually wrong with their argument. Language is a human cultural phenomenon, it’s not math or programming. Who are you to say whether it’s right or wrong? There is a certain variety of English that a certain social class of people have decided is “standard”, but why does that make it objectively correct?
    - fifnir 8y ago
      It's so self evident that I don't know where to begin... Language has rules (They were taught to us in school). They might change over time but they still exist. I'm sure that many "could of"s have been made official over the eons in all languages, (thanks to general ignorance/incompetence/refusal to learn) but that doesn't mean we should respect "couldofers" (see? I made up a word, I'm not that rigid) as if they're the next Shakespeare... Iz their know point at witch "human caltoural fenonemon" stops and blatant misuse starts? Would you not draw the line somewhere? I draw it at "you're/your/couldof" etc and it infuriates me because, not only these people offload a significant part of the work of communication to me, but they have the nerve to consider themselves somehow superior.
      - umanwizard 8y ago
        Yes, you were taught a set of language rules in school. By what objective standard are those rules correct? "Because I learned them in school" isn't a good answer. I also learned in school that it's necessary to raise one's hand before speaking, to ask an authority figure's permission before using the bathroom, and to write math proofs in a two-column format. The point is that plenty of things you learn in school are just social conventions that are useful in certain situations, not reflections of any objective reality. I'm not arguing against the existence of a language standard -- I'm arguing against its validity. As for your intentional misspellings, that is a strawman -- nobody actually writes or talks like that, so you're actually deviating from the cultural phenomenon, there. If people did actually commonly write "iz" for "is", and "know" for "no" (and the rest of your examples), then that sentence would take no effort to understand, and yes, I'd be fine with it.
macdice 8y ago
I think English speakers just find it a bit strange because our own language is such a mess. In fact we don't even agree on how to spell basic words (maybe due to a deliberate political act by Noah Webster? not sure), and there is zero chance of international standardisation at this point, so we can't even imagine an official body that does this. Perhaps that's why some people seem to interpret it as "authoritarian". But in fact many other languages DO have a body like this, and I think it makes perfect sense. I'm not sure if any others have fancy swords and 17th century suits though...
- Simple_Guy 8y ago
  I can imagine a bunch of old people sitting in a room complaining about all the new words the young kids are using and how they are destroying the language.
  - jpatokal 8y ago
    Yeet.
- benj111 8y ago
  "In fact we don't even agree on how to spell basic words" Yes the US seemed to go with Webster, while the rest of the anglosphere went with Johnson. Not quite as simple as that, as there were a few different waves of reform. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_reform https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_re...
  - plopz 8y ago
    And there are fun ones like the etymology of aluminum which went through spellings like a ping pong.
    - mikeash 8y ago
      Just yesterday, I ran into trouble while searching for noise cancelling headphones because the site where I was searching had it spelled “canceling” for some of the products and the search wasn’t fuzzy enough to show both. See also: “Inflammable means flammable? What a country!”
mykowebhn 8y ago
> The evolution of the french language is not dictated by the Académie, but rather by its use by the french people > the Académie is actively trying to find french equivalent for [convenient English words] that are coherent with the etymology of the french language Don't these two sentences you wrote contradict each other? From what I gather, you ARE saying that the French language IS dictated by the Académie, even though you initially wrote the contrary. I'm a little confused.
- gerard2 8y ago
  Well maybe. Maybe someone with a stronger literary background than me could make the argument that providing traductions of english words is just a plus to ensure the completion of the french language and not really an important part of the language evolution. But I just wanted to explain that french people do not feel like the way they speak and write is dictated by the academie.And surely their appreciation of the french language has very little to do with the yellow vests protests.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    > traductions Lucky you, we do not have an academie anglaise...
    - gerard2 8y ago
      Ahah sorry. Thank you, I wouldn't want an englishman with a sword coming at me in my sleep.
- bisRepetita 8y ago
  ???? There is a huge gap between trying to influence the French language, and dictating it (forcing to use it). The Francophones at the end of the day decide what they use, they live as a free society. I welcome people trying to creatively influence a language, whether they are normal people, cool teenagers, rappers and rock stars, Quebecois guardians of the French language, or people at the Academie Francaise.
kstenerud 8y ago
I think it might have something to do with their role of "protecting France from “brainless Globish” and the “deadly snobbery of Anglo-American,” as a member spat out in a speech last month"
- xwolfi 8y ago
  Yeah it bothers a lot of french that “globish” is english-based. I bet you my arm that if the world tried to communicate poorly in french, we would bask in the glory of our beautiful international language :D My fellow countrymen who think globish is a dumbed down version of english have a point, but that it gave rise to millions able to read english litterature somewhat they cannot deny.
flexie 8y ago
Ah - you don't think it's a little off that a tiny, obscure and exclusive group of 70-100 year olds, dressed up in costumes from a bygone era, gets to decide what goes into your official dictionary? Especially when they talk in such pompous way: "Words shoot up like geysers from your pen, tumble in cascades, swirl about, bump into each other, are never at rest". That doesn't sound like someone I would chose to guard a language. I find the sound of the French language absolutely beautiful, including the when you use English words, and I am an admirer of your country's culture. Unlike many here on HN, I also like your version of regulated capitalism. I think the average French person has much better quality of life than the average American. But I really don't see the point in this Académie Française. For a republic, you sure seem to keep a fair share of antiquated institutions and traditions around :-)
- ordu 8y ago
  > "Words shoot up like geysers from your pen, tumble in cascades, swirl about, bump into each other, are never at rest". That doesn't sound like someone I would chose to guard a language. I would not judge based on a single phrase, because I can imagine a very different minds which can produce it. He can be a person who likes to speak, who tries to get a maximum from the language he speaks, who knows language and loves it. Or maybe he just an impositor, consciously or unconsciously. He can love old language and hate any attempts to change it, or he can be happy with some changes while rejecting others. At last, he can just a few minute ago had a conversation with someone else, who spoke like that and it was good, and under impression of that he accidently did the same. It happens sometimes. So this phrase could be produced not by a special mind, but by a special state of mind and had nothing to do with personality traits.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >Ah - you don't think it's a little off that a tiny, obscure and exclusive group of 70-100 year olds, dressed up in costumes from a bygone era, gets to decide what goes into your official dictionary? No. >"Words shoot up like geysers from your pen, tumble in cascades, swirl about, bump into each other, are never at rest" Better that, than the mix of pop culture references and business weasel words, the English have become. I don't think, by your comment, that you understand the sentiments of continental Europeans in general, and the French in particular. >For a republic, you sure seem to keep a fair share of antiquated institutions and traditions around A republic is its traditions. Else it's just a market contract.
Tsubasachan 8y ago
I just love the French for their quaintness. Meanwhile if you want a masters study Dutch language at a Dutch university it is entirely taught in English...
anonu 8y ago
It appears wasteful. Being deadlocked, spending multiples of $100k on ceremonies. The group should be promoting the language and getting people excited about it's use. Instead, French speakers feel guilty when they say 'email' instead of 'courriel' because an ineffectual body refused to admit an Englishism into the language. This holds the language back. Languages are fluid, living breathing things and that aspect should be promoted.
- baud147258 8y ago
  > French speakers feel guilty when they say 'email' Dunno, when I'm using email, or any other English word part of our developper vocabulary, like build or bug, I don't feel guilty, I'm just using the words that are used by the rest of my (all-French) team.
  - mywittyname 8y ago
    And when I'm cooking, I use French terms to describe what I want. It just makes sense this way because the terms are just more specific than if they were translated, i.e., brunoise, mirepoix, chiffonade, etc.
    - baud147258 8y ago
      You and I don't have the same level of cooking, I guess; I've never used any of those terms.
      - mywittyname 8y ago
        Well, I did work in a professional kitchen for about four years. But cooking shows, YouTube videos, and basic cookbooks in America use those terms. I found definitions for mirepoix and chiffonade in Better Homes & Gardening cookbook, which is as white-bread American as it comes (along with many, many other French words). My point was that the culture that produces an innovation ends up defining the terminology because it's easier to use the single term the innovators came up with in their language rather than using long, translated definition for the term. "Bug" instead of "issue when trying to perform a specific action" is not unlike "saute" instead of "fry at high heat stirring or shaking the pan vigorously." I'm not going to say, "jump the onions up."
627467 8y ago
Due to my French language failings I'm much detached from this debate (and more generally francosphere) - I'm more familiar with Spanish and Portuguese languages and their own regulatory pressures. Being a non-native who moved to live in an English speaking country and then a Spanish speaking one (and reading in all 3 languages) I have to say I never stumbled onto Appeal to Authority (of regulatory bodies and or dogmatic dictionaries) in Anglosphere as I have when debating in Spanish and Portuguese (and I guess from this post, French)... Maybe this says more about the people I hang around with rather than cultural specificities of Romance people, but I can certainly feel the power wielded by these Regulatory bodies.
Nasrudith 8y ago
It is laggy, wasteful, and snobby - in service of a purpose we have done just fine without. It would be more surprising if they were held in esteem.
bane 8y ago
So here's my knee-jerk attitude: To the modern non-French speaker with a brief understanding of language evolution, the Académie sounds like something that is ill-conceived, arrogant and doomed to stagnate thought and culture in an attempt to keep France in the 17th century. Languages don't work like the Académie is designed to maintain, and this simple fact will ultimately lead to its irrelevance. Which means that the continued existence of the body seems pointless. As an Anglophone, there's a certain sense of superiority we feel in that we're basically able to go pretty much anywhere and find somebody who speaks passable English and we don't have an equivalent body. Whenever the Académie comes up in the Anglosphere, it's in the context of an attempt to prevent an English word or phrase from officially entering the language, even though (and this is the attitude) "any stupid person can see that English won out and why not just let the loan-words in". So that's my knee-jerk attitude, being entirely honest. However, there's a deep rooted insecurity that's built into many English speakers. The paradox and complexity in the attitude is that English is basically a language of mostly loan words. And due to history, we inherited various modes of the language that represent various social class structures...one of the oldest was the split between the Germanic roots of English and the French (Norman) roots of English in the 11th century. To this day, the Latin or French root words are considered "superior" to the Germanic or Old-English equivalents. In some cases, the Germanic roots are considered "forbidden" while the upper-mode equivalents are considered okay to say in perfectly polite conversation. For example, "fuck" and "fornicate". This insecurity, and the modern global dominance of English (which happily uses "lingua franca" to describe itself) means internet posts about the Académie are bound to make fun of it. But I think it also stems from not understanding in any way the historic reasons such a body was formed, maintained, and then reinstated when it was abolished during the revolution. It's virtually incomprehensible to the modern Anglophone to understand that France in the 17th century had such a diverse linguistic landscape that travel from one village to another meant needing a translator. This post on /r/AskHistorians was incredibly enlightening to me and has completely turned around many of my earlier feelings about the Académie: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7u8oyk/how_true_is_this_claim_in_1789_50_percent_of_the/dtj3h5u/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7u8oyk/how_t... That thread is full of incredible information that I was almost entirely ignorant of and as I read the various follow ups, especially the ones about Napoleon, I realized how important a unified language was for military and economic matters. From the link "As late as 1863, "a quarter of all army recruits were said to speak 'patois' and nothing else," Robb writes. This often didn't last long. There are many reports of soldiers learning French while in military service, because of the necessity of communication and orders. But "men returning from the army quickly reverted to their native tongue. A man who came home to Cellefrouin near Angoulême in 1850 after seven years in the army and thirty years in America was speaking the patois of his boyhood again within a few days." This wasn't a universal case, however. McPhee notes the young men of Mazières who came back home from military service in the 1870s "determined, as a sign of their worldliness, no longer to speak patois" (220). As late as 1914, "there are several reports of Breton soldiers being shot by their comrades in the First World War because they were mistaken for Germans or because they failed to obey incomprehensible orders.""
microcolonel 8y ago
> The evolution of the french language is not dictated by the Académie, but rather by its use by the french people, and the role of the Académie is merely to decide what should or shouldn't be set in stone in the dictionary. I think the weird thing about it is that it is so unnecessary. Dictionary publishers have their opinions, the public has their own, state-run schools have their own still. The proper use of a language flows from the desire of the speaker or writer to be understood. If deferring to the compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary serves that purpose for you, that's great, but the institution is not what legitimizes that decision. Furthermore, in Québec, L'Office québécois de la langue française has real institutional power, and has seriously oppressed people and damaged their lives in service their arbitrary protectionist ideology; harassing small business owners to strike English loan words from their signs, insisting that well-accepted signage be changed to suit them (stop signs with STOP on them are ubiquitous, even in many French speaking places, but in Québec they insist on making the signs also have ARRÊT, or only have ARRÊT on them).
xwolfi 8y ago
And self proclaimed bookkeepers at that. As you said nobody cares and they are always reactive anyway. They cannot invent words or they’ll be ridiculed, so they simply either accept what random dudes like you and me use everyday or they latinise some english word to try to pretend they did something... then must give up under the ridicule caused by the likes of imèle and mot-dièse :D
bunderbunder 8y ago
Native English speaker here. I think what you're seeing is partially due to the misperception that you described, and partially due to the relatively (and, yeah, variably) anti-authoritarian nature of anglo-saxon culture. Also, I'm not sure the idea of trying to keep loanwords out of one's language makes much sense to someone who grows up speaking a language composed almost entirely of loanwords. So that might be why you see so much fixation on that aspect of the Académie.
GuB-42 8y ago
French guy here. The problem I think most of us have with the Académie Française is the disconnect between their decisions and the reality of the french language. Not that they are completely against change, but that they are regularly missing the point when they actually make changes. An example is about CD-ROM. They proposed to rewrite it "cédérom". Basically turning an acronym into a completely made up word. It is ridiculous in many ways. CD-ROM is already a stupid word: both audio CDs and CD-ROMs are read only memory, so why keep that? We already had a word for audio CDs that was in common use: "disque compact", which is perfectly acceptable french, why not build on that? We translated many computer-related words in the past with great success: disquette (floppy disk), mémoire vive (RAM), logiciel (software), etc... Sometimes, a new french translation appears that really sound good. Courriel is one of them: it sounds good and it is definitely french (from courrier (mail) and éléctronique (electronic)). And guess what... it comes from Quebec, like many other good proposals.
- Beldin 8y ago
  Interesting... when I asked a few years ago, I was told by a French guy that nobody uses courriel in real life and that I'd sound better if I used 'mail' (in french pronunciation). He was from île de paris; your mileage may vary.
  - GuB-42 8y ago
    He is right. We all use "mail". And it always means email. "Courriel", or its complete form "courrier éléctronique" is more common in formal, written conversation. I think the translation came up too late. An early french proposal was to use the "mél" abbreviation which is terrible and never took off... It is still preferred by the Académie Française, another case of being completely off. BTW, it is "Île de France", the region where Paris is ;) But the situation is the same for all of continental France. I don't know about the overseas and other French-speaking countries.
  - cbnotfromthere 8y ago
    "He was from île de paris" There is no "île de Paris" in France.

msla 8y ago

> As a french guy, I sense some kind of disdain for the Académie Française that I don't really get. The evolution of the french language is not dictated by the Académie, but rather by its use by the french people, and the role of the Académie is merely to decide what should or shouldn't be set in stone in the dictionary. But deciding what the prestige dialect is is inherently classist and racist, and reifying that classism and racism into a body composed of rich old White people just rubs everyone's noses in it. It's one thing to say "Your dialect is wrong because some amorphous entity says it is" and quite another to say "Your dialect is wrong because this specific group of old people says it is".

gerard2 8y ago
Well nobody is saying that any language is wrong or not. It's just that the french language is kind of an international standard and some people must decide how this standard should adapt with the evolution of the world. But the decision they make are not arbitrary decisions based on their personal feelings, they are guided by the etymology of french.
- onli 8y ago
  > some people must decide how this standard should adapt with the evolution of the world Actually, no. Neither English, Spanish nor German have a dedicated powerful centralized institution that makes those decisions for the language, and I guess Chinese doesn't either? > But the decision they make are not arbitrary decisions based on their personal feelings, they are guided by the etymology of french. French differs strongly from other languages in how current developments are integrated, think ordinateur, portable and not having a word for uploading stuff. They might be guided by some principle, but it leads French being an artificial and very strange language that's hard to learn and differs more than necessary, from English especially.
  - kuschku 8y ago
    German actually has the Rat der Deutschen Sprache which is exactly this and makes exactly these decisions. As do many other languages. The latest change they made was introducing the capital ẞ.
    - bhaak 8y ago
      No, it doesn't if you mean with "exactly these decisions" that it also decides what words are considered officially part of the language. You also got the name wrong. It's "Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung" (Council for German Orthography) and that is exactly what they do. They standardize on the orthography. Nothing more.
  - gerard2 8y ago
    Ahah, what the hell are you talking about. Here is a very hidden list, found on an obscure website, that you might want to look into : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators
    - bhaak 8y ago
      This list doesn't say what scope those regulators have. I only know the situation for German and there the "Council for German Orthography" only regulates orthography not language and word usage, so take this list with a grain of salt.
dorfsmay 8y ago
The idea is to sit back and make choices that make sense when there is a conflict or that are more aligned with the rest if the language, and avoid messes like "biweekly".
- benj111 8y ago
  Or "inflammable". Or "Aural" and "Oral" Or Ox > Oxen, Fox > Foxes
  - raverbashing 8y ago
    None of those are accidents, or maybe all of those are accidents, like it is mostly common in languages
    - benj111 8y ago
      Define accident. None of them seem particularly well thought out, or planned.
      - raverbashing 8y ago
        > None of them seem particularly well thought out, or planned. The question is: is anything planned? People don't even use the correct possessive version of 'it' on the internet. Ox became Oxen because the plural 'en' was the productive plural construction at the time, and it made more sense than writing 'Oxes'. For the other words there might have been a historical reason (or just no reason at all) for it.
        benj111 8y ago
        French is kind of planned, that's why we're having this conversation.
        raverbashing 8y ago
        "Formal French" is planned, but the language goes on without it. For example, the AF is oblivious to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verlan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verlan (unless a word there ends hitting common usage) > Some verlan words, such as meuf, have become so commonplace that they have been included in the Petit Larousse[3] and a doubly "verlanised" version was deemed necessary, so the singly verlanised meuf became feumeu; similarly, the verlan word beur, derived from arabe, has become accepted into popular culture such that it has been re-verlanised to yield rebeu
coldtea 8y ago
>But deciding what the prestige dialect is is inherently classist and racist It's only deemed so by a classist and racist prejudice (that judges other cultures by its own values and metrics to boot). There's nothing "high class" about caring for language. People of all classes can and do root for the French language and Académie's role with it (and vice versa). The idea that "poor people couldn't possibly agree with high standards of language" -- as if poor implies some kind of inferior intellect, or less concern with such things as use of language, arts, etc, is classist itself. >It's one thing to say "Your dialect is wrong because some amorphous entity says it is" and quite another to say "Your dialect is wrong because this specific group of old people says it is". They don't want "amorphous entities" in them here parts. They believe in people, scholars and artists with proven track record that are deemed worthy to be guards of the language and art (which also tends to make them "old", which in matters of experience is prudent. They don't want people eager to bring the "next hot thing" and "fad du jour" in, but people that have seen things, and are blasé about empty novelties). Also, France has historically been a predominantly "white" nation, as were the people who shaped the language in the first place, so by representation it makes sense most of Académie to be white (it includes people of Chinese, Haitian, etc ethnical origins too). Despite that, France has a much better track record for how it treats its blacks, to have the finger pointed at them by Americans.
gerard2 8y ago
I don't know if the Academie is racist, but one of the most famous immortals is Leopold Sedar Senghor, a Senegalese poet and politician, elected in 1983. Only 20 years after the end of the segregation in the US.
fifnir 8y ago
You know what rubs MY nose? When people misuse language and then treat any correction as something snobby. Typical argument from someone who just wrote "could of", or mixed you're with your: "Oh but language is to communicate, and you understood what I'm saying so it worked so stop being snobby about it" gah, makes my blood boil
- umanwizard 8y ago
  You haven’t explained what’s actually wrong with their argument. Language is a human cultural phenomenon, it’s not math or programming. Who are you to say whether it’s right or wrong? There is a certain variety of English that a certain social class of people have decided is “standard”, but why does that make it objectively correct?
  - fifnir 8y ago
    It's so self evident that I don't know where to begin... Language has rules (They were taught to us in school). They might change over time but they still exist. I'm sure that many "could of"s have been made official over the eons in all languages, (thanks to general ignorance/incompetence/refusal to learn) but that doesn't mean we should respect "couldofers" (see? I made up a word, I'm not that rigid) as if they're the next Shakespeare... Iz their know point at witch "human caltoural fenonemon" stops and blatant misuse starts? Would you not draw the line somewhere? I draw it at "you're/your/couldof" etc and it infuriates me because, not only these people offload a significant part of the work of communication to me, but they have the nerve to consider themselves somehow superior.
    - umanwizard 8y ago
      Yes, you were taught a set of language rules in school. By what objective standard are those rules correct? "Because I learned them in school" isn't a good answer. I also learned in school that it's necessary to raise one's hand before speaking, to ask an authority figure's permission before using the bathroom, and to write math proofs in a two-column format. The point is that plenty of things you learn in school are just social conventions that are useful in certain situations, not reflections of any objective reality. I'm not arguing against the existence of a language standard -- I'm arguing against its validity. As for your intentional misspellings, that is a strawman -- nobody actually writes or talks like that, so you're actually deviating from the cultural phenomenon, there. If people did actually commonly write "iz" for "is", and "know" for "no" (and the rest of your examples), then that sentence would take no effort to understand, and yes, I'd be fine with it.

macdice 8y ago

I think English speakers just find it a bit strange because our own language is such a mess. In fact we don't even agree on how to spell basic words (maybe due to a deliberate political act by Noah Webster? not sure), and there is zero chance of international standardisation at this point, so we can't even imagine an official body that does this. Perhaps that's why some people seem to interpret it as "authoritarian". But in fact many other languages DO have a body like this, and I think it makes perfect sense. I'm not sure if any others have fancy swords and 17th century suits though...

Simple_Guy 8y ago
I can imagine a bunch of old people sitting in a room complaining about all the new words the young kids are using and how they are destroying the language.
- jpatokal 8y ago
  Yeet.
benj111 8y ago
"In fact we don't even agree on how to spell basic words" Yes the US seemed to go with Webster, while the rest of the anglosphere went with Johnson. Not quite as simple as that, as there were a few different waves of reform. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_reform https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_re...
- plopz 8y ago
  And there are fun ones like the etymology of aluminum which went through spellings like a ping pong.
  - mikeash 8y ago
    Just yesterday, I ran into trouble while searching for noise cancelling headphones because the site where I was searching had it spelled “canceling” for some of the products and the search wasn’t fuzzy enough to show both. See also: “Inflammable means flammable? What a country!”

mykowebhn 8y ago

> The evolution of the french language is not dictated by the Académie, but rather by its use by the french people > the Académie is actively trying to find french equivalent for [convenient English words] that are coherent with the etymology of the french language Don't these two sentences you wrote contradict each other? From what I gather, you ARE saying that the French language IS dictated by the Académie, even though you initially wrote the contrary. I'm a little confused.

gerard2 8y ago
Well maybe. Maybe someone with a stronger literary background than me could make the argument that providing traductions of english words is just a plus to ensure the completion of the french language and not really an important part of the language evolution. But I just wanted to explain that french people do not feel like the way they speak and write is dictated by the academie.And surely their appreciation of the french language has very little to do with the yellow vests protests.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  > traductions Lucky you, we do not have an academie anglaise...
  - gerard2 8y ago
    Ahah sorry. Thank you, I wouldn't want an englishman with a sword coming at me in my sleep.
bisRepetita 8y ago
???? There is a huge gap between trying to influence the French language, and dictating it (forcing to use it). The Francophones at the end of the day decide what they use, they live as a free society. I welcome people trying to creatively influence a language, whether they are normal people, cool teenagers, rappers and rock stars, Quebecois guardians of the French language, or people at the Academie Francaise.

kstenerud 8y ago

I think it might have something to do with their role of "protecting France from “brainless Globish” and the “deadly snobbery of Anglo-American,” as a member spat out in a speech last month"

xwolfi 8y ago
Yeah it bothers a lot of french that “globish” is english-based. I bet you my arm that if the world tried to communicate poorly in french, we would bask in the glory of our beautiful international language :D My fellow countrymen who think globish is a dumbed down version of english have a point, but that it gave rise to millions able to read english litterature somewhat they cannot deny.

flexie 8y ago

Ah - you don't think it's a little off that a tiny, obscure and exclusive group of 70-100 year olds, dressed up in costumes from a bygone era, gets to decide what goes into your official dictionary? Especially when they talk in such pompous way: "Words shoot up like geysers from your pen, tumble in cascades, swirl about, bump into each other, are never at rest". That doesn't sound like someone I would chose to guard a language. I find the sound of the French language absolutely beautiful, including the when you use English words, and I am an admirer of your country's culture. Unlike many here on HN, I also like your version of regulated capitalism. I think the average French person has much better quality of life than the average American. But I really don't see the point in this Académie Française. For a republic, you sure seem to keep a fair share of antiquated institutions and traditions around :-)

ordu 8y ago
> "Words shoot up like geysers from your pen, tumble in cascades, swirl about, bump into each other, are never at rest". That doesn't sound like someone I would chose to guard a language. I would not judge based on a single phrase, because I can imagine a very different minds which can produce it. He can be a person who likes to speak, who tries to get a maximum from the language he speaks, who knows language and loves it. Or maybe he just an impositor, consciously or unconsciously. He can love old language and hate any attempts to change it, or he can be happy with some changes while rejecting others. At last, he can just a few minute ago had a conversation with someone else, who spoke like that and it was good, and under impression of that he accidently did the same. It happens sometimes. So this phrase could be produced not by a special mind, but by a special state of mind and had nothing to do with personality traits.
coldtea 8y ago
>Ah - you don't think it's a little off that a tiny, obscure and exclusive group of 70-100 year olds, dressed up in costumes from a bygone era, gets to decide what goes into your official dictionary? No. >"Words shoot up like geysers from your pen, tumble in cascades, swirl about, bump into each other, are never at rest" Better that, than the mix of pop culture references and business weasel words, the English have become. I don't think, by your comment, that you understand the sentiments of continental Europeans in general, and the French in particular. >For a republic, you sure seem to keep a fair share of antiquated institutions and traditions around A republic is its traditions. Else it's just a market contract.

Tsubasachan 8y ago

I just love the French for their quaintness. Meanwhile if you want a masters study Dutch language at a Dutch university it is entirely taught in English...

anonu 8y ago

It appears wasteful. Being deadlocked, spending multiples of $100k on ceremonies. The group should be promoting the language and getting people excited about it's use. Instead, French speakers feel guilty when they say 'email' instead of 'courriel' because an ineffectual body refused to admit an Englishism into the language. This holds the language back. Languages are fluid, living breathing things and that aspect should be promoted.

baud147258 8y ago
> French speakers feel guilty when they say 'email' Dunno, when I'm using email, or any other English word part of our developper vocabulary, like build or bug, I don't feel guilty, I'm just using the words that are used by the rest of my (all-French) team.
- mywittyname 8y ago
  And when I'm cooking, I use French terms to describe what I want. It just makes sense this way because the terms are just more specific than if they were translated, i.e., brunoise, mirepoix, chiffonade, etc.
  - baud147258 8y ago
    You and I don't have the same level of cooking, I guess; I've never used any of those terms.
    - mywittyname 8y ago
      Well, I did work in a professional kitchen for about four years. But cooking shows, YouTube videos, and basic cookbooks in America use those terms. I found definitions for mirepoix and chiffonade in Better Homes & Gardening cookbook, which is as white-bread American as it comes (along with many, many other French words). My point was that the culture that produces an innovation ends up defining the terminology because it's easier to use the single term the innovators came up with in their language rather than using long, translated definition for the term. "Bug" instead of "issue when trying to perform a specific action" is not unlike "saute" instead of "fry at high heat stirring or shaking the pan vigorously." I'm not going to say, "jump the onions up."

627467 8y ago

Due to my French language failings I'm much detached from this debate (and more generally francosphere) - I'm more familiar with Spanish and Portuguese languages and their own regulatory pressures. Being a non-native who moved to live in an English speaking country and then a Spanish speaking one (and reading in all 3 languages) I have to say I never stumbled onto Appeal to Authority (of regulatory bodies and or dogmatic dictionaries) in Anglosphere as I have when debating in Spanish and Portuguese (and I guess from this post, French)... Maybe this says more about the people I hang around with rather than cultural specificities of Romance people, but I can certainly feel the power wielded by these Regulatory bodies.

Nasrudith 8y ago

It is laggy, wasteful, and snobby - in service of a purpose we have done just fine without. It would be more surprising if they were held in esteem.

bane 8y ago

So here's my knee-jerk attitude: To the modern non-French speaker with a brief understanding of language evolution, the Académie sounds like something that is ill-conceived, arrogant and doomed to stagnate thought and culture in an attempt to keep France in the 17th century. Languages don't work like the Académie is designed to maintain, and this simple fact will ultimately lead to its irrelevance. Which means that the continued existence of the body seems pointless. As an Anglophone, there's a certain sense of superiority we feel in that we're basically able to go pretty much anywhere and find somebody who speaks passable English and we don't have an equivalent body. Whenever the Académie comes up in the Anglosphere, it's in the context of an attempt to prevent an English word or phrase from officially entering the language, even though (and this is the attitude) "any stupid person can see that English won out and why not just let the loan-words in". So that's my knee-jerk attitude, being entirely honest. However, there's a deep rooted insecurity that's built into many English speakers. The paradox and complexity in the attitude is that English is basically a language of mostly loan words. And due to history, we inherited various modes of the language that represent various social class structures...one of the oldest was the split between the Germanic roots of English and the French (Norman) roots of English in the 11th century. To this day, the Latin or French root words are considered "superior" to the Germanic or Old-English equivalents. In some cases, the Germanic roots are considered "forbidden" while the upper-mode equivalents are considered okay to say in perfectly polite conversation. For example, "fuck" and "fornicate". This insecurity, and the modern global dominance of English (which happily uses "lingua franca" to describe itself) means internet posts about the Académie are bound to make fun of it. But I think it also stems from not understanding in any way the historic reasons such a body was formed, maintained, and then reinstated when it was abolished during the revolution. It's virtually incomprehensible to the modern Anglophone to understand that France in the 17th century had such a diverse linguistic landscape that travel from one village to another meant needing a translator. This post on /r/AskHistorians was incredibly enlightening to me and has completely turned around many of my earlier feelings about the Académie: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7u8oyk/how_true_is_this_claim_in_1789_50_percent_of_the/dtj3h5u/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7u8oyk/how_t... That thread is full of incredible information that I was almost entirely ignorant of and as I read the various follow ups, especially the ones about Napoleon, I realized how important a unified language was for military and economic matters. From the link "As late as 1863, "a quarter of all army recruits were said to speak 'patois' and nothing else," Robb writes. This often didn't last long. There are many reports of soldiers learning French while in military service, because of the necessity of communication and orders. But "men returning from the army quickly reverted to their native tongue. A man who came home to Cellefrouin near Angoulême in 1850 after seven years in the army and thirty years in America was speaking the patois of his boyhood again within a few days." This wasn't a universal case, however. McPhee notes the young men of Mazières who came back home from military service in the 1870s "determined, as a sign of their worldliness, no longer to speak patois" (220). As late as 1914, "there are several reports of Breton soldiers being shot by their comrades in the First World War because they were mistaken for Germans or because they failed to obey incomprehensible orders.""

microcolonel 8y ago

> The evolution of the french language is not dictated by the Académie, but rather by its use by the french people, and the role of the Académie is merely to decide what should or shouldn't be set in stone in the dictionary. I think the weird thing about it is that it is so unnecessary. Dictionary publishers have their opinions, the public has their own, state-run schools have their own still. The proper use of a language flows from the desire of the speaker or writer to be understood. If deferring to the compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary serves that purpose for you, that's great, but the institution is not what legitimizes that decision. Furthermore, in Québec, L'Office québécois de la langue française has real institutional power, and has seriously oppressed people and damaged their lives in service their arbitrary protectionist ideology; harassing small business owners to strike English loan words from their signs, insisting that well-accepted signage be changed to suit them (stop signs with STOP on them are ubiquitous, even in many French speaking places, but in Québec they insist on making the signs also have ARRÊT, or only have ARRÊT on them).

xwolfi 8y ago

And self proclaimed bookkeepers at that. As you said nobody cares and they are always reactive anyway. They cannot invent words or they’ll be ridiculed, so they simply either accept what random dudes like you and me use everyday or they latinise some english word to try to pretend they did something... then must give up under the ridicule caused by the likes of imèle and mot-dièse :D

bunderbunder 8y ago

Native English speaker here. I think what you're seeing is partially due to the misperception that you described, and partially due to the relatively (and, yeah, variably) anti-authoritarian nature of anglo-saxon culture. Also, I'm not sure the idea of trying to keep loanwords out of one's language makes much sense to someone who grows up speaking a language composed almost entirely of loanwords. So that might be why you see so much fixation on that aspect of the Académie.

GuB-42 8y ago

French guy here. The problem I think most of us have with the Académie Française is the disconnect between their decisions and the reality of the french language. Not that they are completely against change, but that they are regularly missing the point when they actually make changes. An example is about CD-ROM. They proposed to rewrite it "cédérom". Basically turning an acronym into a completely made up word. It is ridiculous in many ways. CD-ROM is already a stupid word: both audio CDs and CD-ROMs are read only memory, so why keep that? We already had a word for audio CDs that was in common use: "disque compact", which is perfectly acceptable french, why not build on that? We translated many computer-related words in the past with great success: disquette (floppy disk), mémoire vive (RAM), logiciel (software), etc... Sometimes, a new french translation appears that really sound good. Courriel is one of them: it sounds good and it is definitely french (from courrier (mail) and éléctronique (electronic)). And guess what... it comes from Quebec, like many other good proposals.

Beldin 8y ago
Interesting... when I asked a few years ago, I was told by a French guy that nobody uses courriel in real life and that I'd sound better if I used 'mail' (in french pronunciation). He was from île de paris; your mileage may vary.
- GuB-42 8y ago
  He is right. We all use "mail". And it always means email. "Courriel", or its complete form "courrier éléctronique" is more common in formal, written conversation. I think the translation came up too late. An early french proposal was to use the "mél" abbreviation which is terrible and never took off... It is still preferred by the Académie Française, another case of being completely off. BTW, it is "Île de France", the region where Paris is ;) But the situation is the same for all of continental France. I don't know about the overseas and other French-speaking countries.
- cbnotfromthere 8y ago
  "He was from île de paris" There is no "île de Paris" in France.