Language Troubles of a Tongue en Crise

By William R. Doerner

On Wednesday afternoons when school is not in session, French children can tune in a popular TV game show that has no American parallel. The program confronts young contestants with invidious English expressions that have infiltrated common parlance and invites them to concoct substitutes in their own language. Some of the prizewinning neologisms: for milkshake, mouslait (literally, milk foam); for hot dog, saucipain (sausage bread); for fast- food outlet, restapouce (quick-bite restaurant). Outsiders often dismiss such exercises as evidence of France's obsession with maintaining the purity of its beloved tongue, especially against the encroachments of Franglais. But lately the guardians of the linguistic heritage of Voltaire and Racine have been voicing a more serious concern: whether French might cease to be an international language altogether.

Worldwide, French is the first language of some 109 million people, fewer than those who primarily speak English (403 million), Spanish (266 million) or even Portuguese (154 million). Fifty years ago, British Writer W. Somerset Maugham correctly called French "the common language of educated men." Today that distinction incontestably goes to English in the fields of science, technology, economics and finance, not to mention movies, rock music and air travel. As French President Francois Mitterrand said last year, "France is engaged in a 'war' with Anglo-Saxon."

Last week Mitterrand and French Premier Jacques Chirac took up the battle in Quebec City at the Second Annual Francophone Summit. The meeting brought together representatives of 38 countries that use French as a primary or secondary language, including Belgium, Switzerland, Canada and former French colonies in Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean and the Pacific. While the concept of a union of French-speaking communities was developed 20 years ago, not until last year did Paris acknowledge its dependence on this fraternity to bolster the mother tongue by convening the first such summit in Paris. This time around, the French left no doubt as to their commitment to the cause. Chirac pledged to spend $30 million on a host of French-language projects, twice last year's allocation. Among the ventures to be funded: a French- language theater festival to be held this year in Limoges, a TV news agency covering French-speaking lands, and the first "Francophone international athletic games," set for Morocco in 1989.

The French have always struggled to keep their language pure, but in recent years the effort has become a top national priority. The Paris government now boasts a Secretary of State for Francophone Affairs. The country also has what amounts to a language patrol. Since 1977 the General Association for the Users of the French Language has won modest civil-court damages from some 40 companies and other groups for violating a 1911 law that forbids the use of English words in the conduct of business when French equivalents exist. Among the offenders: Trans World Airlines, which had issued boarding passes only in English.

Nowhere is the battle to uphold French more heated than in the fields of science, commerce and high technology, which are dominated the world over by English. "Our technical contribution," the newsmagazine Le Point recently lamented, "stopped with the word chauffeur." To strike back, committees have been formed by industrial and educational groups to create new French words for every modern occasion. Thus, a Frenchman now listens to his baladeur, rather than a Walkman, and plans vacations according to his partage de temps, and not his time-share. While some of the expressions are felicitous -- the computer term random-access memory becomes simply memoire vive (live memory) -- some are decidedly clumsy. Computer hardware is vaguely called materiel, and the futures market has become le marche de contrats a terme (limited-term contract market). But, insists Mitterrand, "either our language is in the computer data base or it ceases to be one of the great methods of communication in the world."

Not all the French are enthusiastic about such campaigns to maintain linguistic purity. Languages must evolve to survive, argues Author Jean- Francois Revel, and much of the resistance to the influx of foreign words is thinly disguised "French xenophobia." Indeed, French has long been enriched by English expressions (not to mention such charming Anglo-French jumbles as le smoking for a tuxedo), just as English has absorbed such words as bouquet and carrousel. Others believe that the invasion of English is inevitable, especially in technical and business fields, and urge that more Frenchmen give in and learn to speak it. Says French Foreign Trade Minister Michel Noir: "We would certainly be taken more seriously if we became Angliciste."

With reporting by WILLIAM RADEMAEKERS/PARIS