(Paris) The French Academy adopted a report on Tuesday denouncing the confusion due to the abundance of Anglicisms in institutional communication, and the risk of “a loss of linguistic references”.
Posted at 5:18 p.m.
Entitled “So that French institutions speak French”, the thirty-page report was written by an ad hoc commission, made up of six academicians.
The Academy, guardian of the language of Molière, detects “a worrying development”, namely an “invasive anglicization”.
According to her, “a number of Anglicisms are used instead of existing French words or expressions with the inevitable consequence of the gradual erasure of the French equivalents”.
“Follower” would, for example, be too often favored over “subscriber, but also follower, friend, contact, fan, follower”, she explains.
“The massive and continuous spread of an often distorted Anglo-American vocabulary, wrongly considered to be well known to the general public and of almost universal use, has the contradictory consequence of the risk of an impoverishment in proportion to the French lexicon, and ‘increasing discrimination between audiences,’ lamented the Immortals.
The report gives dozens of examples, from public institutions, agencies, local authorities, public or private companies.
Some are widespread and/or easy to understand (declinations of “start-up”, “com kit”, “valley”, etc.). Others require a certain command of English, such as “bleisure” (a portmanteau between “business” and “leisure”), the slogan “Unboring the future” of a car manufacturer, etc.
Beyond the lexicon, the French Academy deplores “consequences of a certain gravity on the syntax and the very structure of French”.
With “the disappearance of prepositions” and “the deletion of articles”, according to his observation “the syntax is jostled, which constitutes a real attack on the language”.
In conclusion, the academicians put forward “a few recommendations”, which must “contribute to the maintenance of French and allow the French language to participate in successful globalization”.
Under the impetus of its permanent secretary Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, the French Academy has very recently become more offensive in its mission to preserve the coherence and place of French.
In January, she announced her plan to go before the administrative courts to contest the new model of the identity card, bilingual French-English, contrary according to her to article 2 of the Constitution (“The language of the Republic is the French “).