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Add to FavoritesAs individuals, the French do not have better language skills than other citizens of other countries. However, there are some fundamental differences between the way French society considers its language and the way anglophone countries treat their language.
The French academy, as an institution, is there to regulate French usage, and acts as a censor of words, especially those which come directly from English. Therefore, where the Oxford English dictionary tends to include new words according to usage, the dictionary published by the French academy (which is rarely used by the general public - we tend to use the Larousse or the Robert dictionaries) banns some words despite strong usage.
We might think that such a tendency to keep the language "pure" would help its evolution, not tainting it with foreign influences which might distort the language. But that argument doesn't stand when we consider language as a living thing. Something that people use all the time, and which changes with the different needs of the population.
In English institutions, the rule has always been to include foreign influences in order to enhance the language, and make it as universal as possible. This probably greatly helped English to become a widely spoken language.
In French institutions, as well as in Quebec, the rule has mostly been to preserve the language. But doesn't preservation mean that what we preserve is ultimately dying?
Fortunately, the French speakers are far off from the French academy, and use diverse and eclectic vocabulary. Between "verlan" slang and English words that have been converted into French, there is a wide choice to let the French language live and be as close to its society's identity. Yes, it is true that some verb tenses are dying because they are not used anymore (such as the past tense of the subjunctive form - "imparfait du subjonctif"). This might be detrimental to the richness of the language. However, some words that come from English are taken into the French language, but ironically belonged there from the very beginning since their origin comes from middle French! The dialog between languages, this capacity to steal and borrow words is fascinating!
Let's not forget the French spoken in Africa, which also mixes various influences and creates a rich, full french language, which go beyond the rigid rules of ancient institutions such as the French academy.
French is a somewhat rigid language, partly because of its institutionalization with the french academy. But, the French speakers seem to love their language, enough to accept foreign influences and incorporate them in the fabric of French.
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No
Mais non! If you live in France for a while, you will soon learn that speakers of French are no different than speakers of English, Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish, Greek, or, for that matter, Hebrew. Speakers of a native language talk too fast; French is no exception. The French slur, clip, dice and slice words, elide vowels, swallow their consonants, and exhibit all the symptoms of "lazy mouth" shown by speakers of other languages. The French are no better than anywhere else when it comes to the spoken language.
When we come to instruction in the fundamentals of language - grammar, vocabulary, spelling, punctuation -, it is difficult to think of a Western European educational system where students are not better taught than in the United States. You do not hear of businesses in Europe having to send employees to school to learn how to write their native language. The fundamentals of their languages are still taught in Europe; France is no better at this task than, for instance, Holland or Germany.
France is a large country, for Europe, that is. You will not find many polyglots in the interior. If it were not for the Internet and the increasingly global economical and technological basis of our world, I sincerely doubt that English would be understood outside of Paris or the French Riviera today. In Alsace, as in all border areas, people are bi-lingual: French and German. Across the border from Ventimiglia, Italian is spoken in Menton.
Reading 19th-century Italian, one finds so many archaisms that a full-sized dictionary had better be constantly at your side. The same is true of Greek and German. Modern Hebrew has had semantic shifts, changes in meaning, in such a short space of time that not knowing of a shift can be embarrassing.
Semanti c shifts bring us to the only area where French has a legitimate claim to have better language skills than other peoples. What the French have is the French Academy.
Cardinal Richelieu wanted French to be the "universal" language, exactly as Latin had been. To reach such a goal, the language had to be clear and stable. He created the French Academy in 1635 for this purpose.
The composition of the Academy is eclectic: its members include novelists, poets, generals, statesmen, scientists, historians, ambassadors, lawyers, doctors, and dramatists who have distinguished themselves in their fields.
The membership is limited to 40 people who collectively are guardians of the French language. The Academy keeps semantic shifts under control. Unlike English, where many students need a glossary to read the 17th-century plays of Shakespeare, the 17th-century plays of Jean-Baptiste Racine are still readable - because of the Academy.
English has the Oxford English Dictionary; French has the Academy. The Academy produces the authoritative French Dictionary and they take their time over it, weighing and examining each word before deciding on a correct and complete entry. They usually take 70 years to produce a new edition.
Writing in the mid-twentieth century, Andre Maurois maintained that language changes slowly. This was well before the Internet challenged that assertion. Nevertheless, what Maurois, a member of the Academy, wrote then about how slowly the Academy works remains true. When Maurois left in 1939 to join the army, "the word under discussion was agresseur; when I came back after the German surrender, they had progressed to ardeur." The Academy met weekly on their regular schedule throughout the war.
The French Academy ensures that slang, the most ephemeral of new words, does not make it into the dictionary until tested by time. Nor does the Academy assume that street language, creoles (mixed language offshoots), and dialects are the proper guides to correct French usage. Only new words that have survived the passage of time and have been used by their finest writers in their specialized fields make it into the dictionary.
Across more than 370 years the French Academy produced at least one work of art: the French language. Stability has a price: a work of art is static. In terms of stability, and only in terms of stability, the French may be considered to have better language skills than other countries.
Andre Maurois, in, Holiday in France: collected [from articles in Holiday magazine] and illustrated by Ludwig Bemelmans. Pages 66-76.
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