Amglish In, Like, Ten Easy Lessons_ A Celebration of the New World Lingo - Arthur E. Rowse [42]
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has also been defensive, complaining of “snobism” by French diplomats who prefer English.22 The defensiveness is based on the popular phrase: “Mon pays c’est ma langue” (My country is my language). As Monique Briendwalker, a French teacher in the United States, puts it, “It’s a fight to survive as a culture, as a power, as a nation.”23
SIGNS OF CHANGE
But there never has been any doubt as to which side was winning. It has always been the brash linguistic invaders. One of the signs of change came in 1990 when the National Textbook Company in Lincolnwood, Illinois, published its Dictionary of Faux Amis by C. W. E. Kirk-Greene. Starting with its Frenglish title, it indirectly documented the way English was altering the French language by including a large number of English words used by the French. Examples are book, building, cake, car, cherry, chips, crash, and legs.
500 FALSE FRIENDS IN FRENCH
The Dictionary of Faux Amis contains approximately five hundred “false friends,” mostly French words that have a different meaning in English from what even a speaker of French might expect, plus words with several meanings to choose from. For example, aimer can mean “to love” in French while its false friend is “to aim.” Likewise, the word appel can mean both an appeal and a telephone call.
The author also points out that c’est un as is not the insult it sounds like but just the opposite: “he or it is top class.” Another example is monnaie, which normally means money or currency. But to say you don’t have any monnaie in French may mean you’re loaded but don’t have any change.
Never mind the trends. Full speed ahead, say French authorities. As recently as March 2008, the Academy issued sixty-five pages of prohibited words, including blog, e-mail, fast food, podcasting, supermodel, and even such terms as shadowboxing and detachable motor caravan. Among the directives to the French people were: use acces sans fil a l’internet for Wi-Fi, diffusion pour baladeur for iPod, toile d’araignee mondiale for the World Wide Web, and courriel for e-mail.24 Bonne chance with all that.
FRENCH ED CHIEF GIVES UP
Less than six months later, however, at least one key French official quietly hoisted the white flag of surrender. Xavier Darcos, the French education minister, admitted that the key to success was not better French but better English. He was quoted by the London Daily Mail Online as saying that using poor English had suddenly become a “handicap” because international business was being conducted in that language. He added more money for teaching English to students who did not have money for private lessons.
A year later, French author Eric Semmour sadly noted that the French elite had also given up fighting English. “They don’t care anymore,” he told a reporter. “They all speak English, and the working class . . . don’t care about preserving the integrity of the language either.”25
According to a 2004 poll by the Pew Research Center, 68 percent of those aged sixty-five and older in France agreed that young people need to learn English to succeed in the world today. Pew found similar results in other European countries.
RETURNING TO GERMANY
The old language is flooding back. That’s what many Germans must be thinking as English words inundate their nation and the world at a time when most Germans know enough English and American words and expressions to converse with each other in English. The first signs of what we now call English came largely from West German, Frisian, and Nordic invaders of the British Isles midway through the first millennium.
Since then, the German and English languages have shared many of the same words as well as grammatical structure. There are no reliable figures to show which European nation has become the most Americanized linguistically, but all signs point to Germany.