“Footballically” yours!, title Samy in his open letter of March 25. Although my interest in football is limited, this text was a real moment of happiness, since it is indeed the French language that it deals with, through the eyes of a student who has French at heart. This fifth-grade student gives us the perfect demonstration that the word “footballistically” has its place in a dictionary of contemporary French.
First, it is the logical derivative of an adjective attested by dictionaries (football). Second, it has been in use in a variety of settings for several years. We had the same thought at Druide informatics in 2021, when we decided to add the adverb “footballistically” in good and due form to the dictionaries of Antidote, where it has appeared since Antidote 10.
But this inspired (and inspiring!) young author shows us another essential fact: the French language is very much alive. Whether through politics, commerce or football, it innovates, creates and adapts. As a linguist at Druide Informatique, I have the incredible opportunity to observe it and experience it every day. And since we’ve been talking a lot about the decline of the French language lately, I wanted to take the floor for a short moment to share with you my point of view, from where we create dictionaries.
French is so dynamic that it occupies a team of full-time lexicographers who have been working hard to keep the dictionaries up to date for 30 years this year. Following the strict rules established by our language committee, these passionate professionals add words, examples, synonyms, co-occurrences, families, and so on!
And the best part is that since Antidote’s dictionaries are digital, these constant additions of novelties do not force us to remove others and forget the past: for Antidote, the space of language is infinite. . Lexicographers still have a bright future ahead of them!
And how do we find these additions, you might ask? We certainly use, at Druide, powerful tools for monitoring neologisms. But what remains for me the most edifying are the hundreds of requests that I see every year, patiently and meticulously written by French speakers from all over the world. They have discovered a new word or a new meaning, imposed by the march of technology or popularized by current events, and wish to see it enter the dictionary so that all can use it.
Like Samy Moubah, these committed people, who have become our partners over the years, act to make French live. I salute them and thank them, on behalf of my entire team and the entire Francophonie.