Image courtesy of France Channel, “Brûlez Molière!” (2018)
On a rainy morning in Paris, a billboard above the Métro announces a new campaign: “Upgrade ton style.” The ad is in French — almost. Below, a woman scrolls through her phone, liking a post about le brunch de dimanche. Nearby, a teenager complains that his teacher’s class is “so cringe.”
To the Académie Française — the self-proclaimed guardian of the French language — this is nothing short of cultural erosion. To most French people, it’s just how they talk now.
The French tongue, long a symbol of clarity, precision, and pride, is being remixed in real time. From tech startups to TikTok, English has become the language of innovation, irony, and influence. And for the first time in centuries, France is asking itself a question that once seemed unthinkable: Can Molière survive the meme age?
The Purity of a Prestige Language
For centuries, France has treated its language as something sacred — a living monument to civilization itself. Since 1635, the Académie Française has acted as its custodian, issuing official rulings on grammar, spelling, and even vocabulary.
It was the Académie that decided the gender of words like ordinateur (computer, masculine) and voiture (car, feminine), and that periodically releases lists of “approved” French equivalents for creeping English imports. (Don’t say email, say courriel; not hashtag, but mot-dièse.)
Yet in practice, these interventions rarely stick. Few outside Quebec say courriel with a straight face. Le week-end, le business, and le selfie reign supreme.
The irony is that the French themselves helped make their language global — through diplomacy, empire, and culture — and are now struggling to contain it within their own borders.
The Anglophone Avalanche
The current wave of Anglicisms isn’t driven by diplomacy or pop music, but by technology.
English dominates the worlds of software, science, and start-ups. When your day involves scrolling, streaming, swiping, and liking, English slips naturally into your speech.
“English has become the lingua franca of the digital world,” says Marie Treps, a linguist specializing in loanwords. “The problem isn’t that French lacks words. It’s that English arrives faster than institutions can react.”
From le cloud to le deepfake, French users adapt English words with a wink — often by simply adding an article or a gendered suffix. It’s linguistic bricolage: playful, practical, and increasingly pervasive.
But critics warn that this “Franglais” dilutes not just vocabulary, but identity. If you can’t describe your world in your own language, they argue, do you still truly own it?
A Cultural Identity Crisis
For France, language has never been just a tool; it’s a worldview. To speak French, historically, was to think rationally, to express ideas with elegance and order. This belief — sometimes caricatured as linguistic snobbery — is woven into the country’s DNA.
That’s why Anglicisms provoke such visceral reactions. They’re seen not merely as borrowings, but as invasions — reminders of American cultural hegemony and global homogenization.
In 1994, the Toubon Law made it mandatory for public institutions and advertisements to use French, not English. But in the digital era, that’s almost impossible to police. Social media posts, tech jargon, and global brands bypass state control.
And young people, who move seamlessly between French and English online, often find these debates quaint. “We don’t think about it,” says Léa, a 21-year-old student in Lyon. “It’s just our way of talking. English feels cooler, faster — more now.”
The Case for Evolution
Yet not everyone sees this as decay. Some linguists argue that French is not being destroyed but enriched. Languages have always borrowed from one another — Latin, Arabic, and Italian words still flow through modern French. Why not English, too?
“The idea of linguistic purity is a fantasy,” says Bernard Cerquiglini, former director of France’s linguistic observatory. “What makes a language strong is its ability to adapt — not its refusal to change.”
Indeed, some Anglicisms fill real gaps: le streaming and le binge-watching describe phenomena that French society adopted, not invented. To resist them entirely would be to resist modern life itself.
The French genius, perhaps, lies not in rejecting English but in transforming it — bending foreign words until they sound unmistakably local.
Between Resistance and Reinvention
France’s linguistic future will likely be bilingual in spirit, if not in law. The French will keep saying le selfie and le startup, but they’ll also keep writing poetry, laws, and love letters in a language that remains uniquely their own.
In other words, French will survive not because it shuts the door to change, but because it opens the window just enough to breathe.
Back at that Paris café, the barista calls out, “Un latte pour Sophie!” The drink might have an English name, but the sound of it — rounded, melodic, unmistakably French — tells another story.
Molière’s ghost, one suspects, would raise an eyebrow… and then order one for himself.