Word: french
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...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...
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...
...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...
...they proceeded, yet another flotilla of U.S. warships sailed into the Gulf of Oman. The arrival of the battleship U.S.S. Missouri and five escort vessels brought the total U.S. naval force in the region to 46 ships. The Western armada may soon exceed 60 ships when additional British and French vessels arrive. And last week Italy announced that it was sending a naval task force to the gulf to protect its merchant shipping...