Protecting or persecuting the French language? The unpleasant underbelly of France’s linguistic watchdog, L’académie française

View of L’Académie Française from the Louvre. All images belong to author.

Haussmann’s topographical reconstitution of Paris during the 1800s marked the début of the city’s architectural purification; grand boulevards and manicured gardens replaced inner-city slums whose population were, instead, banished to the banlieue — etymologically speaking, the city’s literal ‘place of exile.’ In a city whose new geography is predicated on the principle of expulsion and eradication, the edifices that are placed at the physical centre-point are clearly more than merely incidental. The central Pont des Arts connects two of Paris’s key institutions; the famed Musée de Louvre on the one side, and the infamous Académie française on the other. As Paris’s largest museum (and tourist hotspot par excellence) the Louvre’s positioning is logical, natural even, but why is such prime real estate afforded to what is (seemingly) a largely inert, ceremonial government body, L’Académie française? 

Across the channel, the Académie française means little to us, especially given that there is no equivalent in the anglo-sphere and, beyond the francophone world, the actions of the Académie are effectively inconsequential. However, whilst the Académie’s publications are far from prolific—with the current dictionary edition a ‘work-in-progress’ since 1986—the influence it has over the sociolinguistic workings of the French language is pervasive, immutable and undeniable. The self-professed, principal function of the Académie is to ‘maintain and preserve the purity of the French language’ — a mission statement possessing of a surreptitious hostility. The process of ‘preservation’ necessitates near-clinical conditions; items must be kept airtight, hermetically sealed. Preservation is not simply an act of protection or maintenance, but rather one of enforced stagnancy. Applying such a constrictive principle to language —an entity that is perpetually evolving—thus renders the Académie’s mission oppressive, near despotic. Attempting to maintain the version of the French language that was standardised in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in today’s modern, globalised, multicultural landscape is entirely unnatural, and can only be achieved by the kind of linguistic authoritarianism that the Académie proliferates. 

In seeking to maintain the purity and integrity of the French language, the Académie engages in a sinister process of social distillation. The stringent language standards of the Académie mean that, by definition, there is little room for variation, and the Académie has a history of refusing to bend its regulations to accommodate linguistic diversity; they have actively opposed the French government’s proposal to constitutionally offer recognition and protection to regional languages (Breton, Basque, Occitan, etc), and claimed that ‘l’écriture inclusive’ (inclusive writing) puts the French language in ‘mortal danger’. But what is the ‘mortal’ threat to the French language that the Académie fears? Is it the end of the French language in its entirety, or the end of the conservative, Napoleonic vision of the French identity? 

There seems to be a latent xenophobia underpinning the Académie’s search for linguistic purity, elucidated by its refusal to acknowledge the existence of verlan  —a type of slang featuring inversion of syllables in a word, most frequently employed by Paris’s immigrant population residing in the banlieue. ‘Femme’ is now ‘meuf’ and ‘ouf’ is the new ‘fou’.Though now a firm part of mainstream French culture, a search for verlan on the Académie’s website produces no results, peculiar given its significant historical heritage; verlan was used by members of the French resistance during WWII, as a means of bemusing the occupying German soldiers. Shouldn’t a form of language that helped bring France to victory be a source of national pride? Why is the verlan that helped defeat Nazi forces shrouded with disapproval by the Académie rather than heralded and protected? Its usage during the war means that, in fact, verlan played a primordial role in conserving the French national identity, and so its characterisation as a foreign, linguistic impurity is a fictitious and deeply deceptive narrative; it is only the appropriation of verlan by the maghrébins that has rendered it unrefined in the eyes of the Académie. Though verlan is used by a large French contingent, the Académie seems only to want to deny its presence, regarding it as a dangerous linguistic mutation. But how can the most current form of the language used by banlieusards and bobos alike be seen as anomalous or aberrant? The reality is that verlan is not an unseemly lexical deviation, but proof of France’s evolving ethnic and cultural constitution. Ultimately, the Académie française does not fear the obliteration of the French language, but rather the eradication of a conventional—now outmoded—bourgeois French identity and the language that sustains it. 

In refusing to acknowledge linguistic change, the Académie also fails to recognise the transformation of the country’s socio-cultural landscape, and if the French language no longer represents its users, it runs the risk of becoming entirely obsolete. The Académie’s draconian regulations have made the French language a dishonest truth of what the country looks like in the modern day. Without openness to change, the French of the Académie becomes antediluvian rather than authentic, leaving its motto —À l’immortalité—steeped in irony.