The Dictionary in the Service of the State: The Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française and the Dictionnaire des termes officiels de la langue française

The Dictionary in the Service of the State: The Dictionnaire de l'Académie Française and the Dictionnaire des termes officiels de la languefrançaise t: Douglas A. Kibbee ''he French state has long been concerned with the control of the French language, starting in the Middle Ages, continuing with the establishment of the Académie Française in 1635, then with revolutionary decrees against linguistic variation and most recently in the promulgation of laws to control use and usage (Loi BasLauriol , 1975; Loi Toubon, 1994). In 1986 the most recent edition, the ninth, of the Dictionnaire de l'AcadémieFrançaise (DAF) began appearing in fascicles, and Volume 1 was issued as a whole in 1992. In 1994, the Délégation Générale à la Langue Française produced a new edition of the collection of terms included in ministerial terminological decrees, the Dictionnaire des termes officiels de la languefrançaise (DTOLF). These both appeared at a time when government intervention in language affairs was increasing rapidly. The Loi "Toubon," officially known as the "Loi relative à l'emploi de la langue française" was passed in 1994, a law that required the use of French words in the place of borrowings when there existed a French term approved by the appropriate authorities . Both the DAF and the DTOLF were meant to serve as the standard for the enforcement of this type of legislation. Thus, the dictionaries are the primary tools in top-down language planning as the state seeks to slow the rate of linguistic change. Here I will first describe the history of French language policy, focusing on points of intersection between lexicography and state intervention in linguistic matters. In a second part, I will trace in more detail the recent efforts that have led to the substantially altered form of the DAF and the creation of the DTOLF and will explore in some depth the shortcomings of the latter. Finally, I will describe some of 24Douglas A. Kibbee the more imaginative ways that the French government has attempted to democratize the control of French vocabulary. Although the earliest developments in language legislation in France were efforts at status planning, i.e., language planning to influence what social contexts a particular language is used in, it was not long before these efforts transformed themselves into what we would today call corpus planning, i.e., intervention concerning the form of a particular language. Thus, the simple declarations that the law must be conducted in French, typical of the decrees that led up to the famous Ordonnance de Villers-Cotterêts (1539), all specified that French must be used in the courts of the southern part of the kingdom . However, commentaries by the poets of the Pléaide in the 1550s and 1560s, the creation of the first "Académie" (the Académie des Derniers Valois, in the 1570s), and in particular the types of commentary on usage that are exemplified in Malherbe's work in the early 17th century, followed by the establishment of the Académie Française in the 1630s — all of these focused the attention of linguistic commentary on the individual word and the dictionary as the primary tool of the arbiters of language. The Académie had the charge of writing four types of linguistic commentary: the dictionary (which first appeared in 1694), the grammar (1932), a guide to poetics (never written), and a guide to rhetoric (never written). The DAF was not the first dictionary of French, and it is instructive to see how this "official" dictionary differed from its predecessors . The first French-French dictionary was Jean Nicot's Thresor de la langue françoise (1606), both the culmination of the Latin-French lexicographic tradition started by Robert Estienne and the beginning of the French monolingual dictionary tradition. Its word list was primarily derived from the Latin word list established by Estienne through his exhaustive survey of classical Latin sources. This was then a guide to the French translation of the best Latin, but it was not a guide to the best French and thus did not serve the centralization of power envisioned by the Bourbon kings. Nicot included a wide...