ABSTRACT
The strength of the purist tradition in France has meant that neologisms have often been seen at best as a necessary evil. Reaction to borrowings, however, has tended to be much more negative, on the grounds that by adopting material from other languages, French speakers are neglecting their 'native resources', that is, material which comes from within the French system, in favour of using external or foreign material which is likely to disrupt the balance of the system and cause problems of assimilation. Purists and dirigistes alike would always tend to prefer neologisms formed by derivation or composition to foreign imports or borrowings from dialects. However, given the long and varied history of word formation in French and the multiplicity of creative possibilities open to the would-be neologizer, this distinction between internal and external resources is very difficult to sustain.
