Le français en liberté: frenglish ou diversité by Patricia Latour, et Francis Combes (review)

This collection of chroniques, published in L'Humanité from 2014 to 2016, is introduced by Claude Hagège. Having written volumes such as Le français, histoire d'un combat (1996) and Combat pour le français (2006), Hagège is a vocal antagonist in the language wars, an image too often invoked by the defenders of French, confronted by an apparently unstoppable invasion of Anglicisms. Perhaps piqued by accusations of rigid prescriptivism, Hagège teases us with the observation that the authors have successfully navigated a middle ground between anglomanie and a reflexive rejection of borrowings. Unfortunately, his tease is just that: he arouses our interest without satisfying it. Instead, these short articles display no significant differences from the standard-issue prescriptivist screed. Hagège and the authors consistently view borrowings from American English as a form of linguistic and cultural imperialism. They are vectors for the introduction of a capitalistic economic model and the leadership of a global elite. Numerous examples abound: the word challenge appears more modern, more efficient (two North American traits) but, above all, is better adapted to an ultra-liberal (= capitalist) ideology (73). Le burnout likewise participates in the ideological world of global capitalism. Although the authors' etymological analyses are in general correct, when it comes to English, they propose bizarreries that portray ignorance at best but more often a willful negative cultural stereotype. The origin of cool is not the expression "cool as a cucumber" (149) but rather finds its roots in African-American jazz and bop talk. The authors draw a connection between the use of Sud de France (as opposed to le Midi) to imagined associations with the American South: Faulkner, the Ku Klux Klan, and the smell of Marlboros. On other occasions, the authors seem to be less arbiters of usage but rather arbitri elegantiae: borrowings and innovations are characterized as vilains and monstrueux even though they fill a semantic gap in current usage. Prescriptivists tend to propose alternative formulations that ignore the narrow semantic space occupied by the borrowing. A favorite target of the prescriptivists is coach and coacher. I have argued elsewhere that coacher cannot replace entraîner in all of its usages: Je m'entraîne is certainly more frequent than je me coache. Although I have criticized the authors' refusal to accept many borrowings, I acknowledge their positive reception of Arabisms, the jargon of the cités, as well as loans from Greek, Turkish, and German. The explanation appears to be that these relatively few words along with the nonproductivity of their source languages do not threaten the well-being of French. As a final remark: the authors fail to distinguish between borrowings and linguistic innovation. Consider the expression le relooking. This is an innovation derived from the borrowing le look that incorporates the French prefix re- and the English substantivizing morpheme-ing, already "nativized." A bastard or a legitimate child?