ABSTRACT
The influence of English on the French language has proved to be the most contentious linguistic issue of the twentieth century, provoking more popular polemics and government intervention than either spelling reform or the widening gap between the written norm and spoken usage. The debate is often couched in highly emotive terms, with metaphors of pestilence, disease and war enlivening the pages of learned journals and the conclusions of official commissions:
On pourrait…comparer l’effet de l’emprunt abusif au mécanisme par lequel telle cellule, mal préparée a se défendre, devient monstrueuse et prolifère aux dépens de tout le corps, jusqu’à le tuer…l
In 1964, with his book Parlez-vous franglais?, an exercise in eloquent rhetoric and amusing pastiche rather than a work of scholarship, René Etiemble helped to mobilise influential sections of public opinion against the threat of American English, perceived as both a symptom and a tool of military and economic domination in the postwar period: ‘pour gagner tout à fait sa partie, il faut que ce dollar tue notre langue’. The idea that language is inseparable from culture and thought, and that linguistic influence necessarily entails the adoption of alien ways of behaving and thinking is a recurring theme in Etiemble’s work: ‘dispensons-nous d’emprunter, avec le vocabulaire des Yanquis, les défauts et les vices qu’il annonce’.
