Some observations on the way French people speak français outside the Académie
“French is the hardest language in the world.”
It’s a sentence I’ve heard quite a few times from French people. Whether it’s true or not remains to be seen, but for a non-native speaker like me, it can sometimes feel that way.
Having just returned to France three months ago, I’m in a funny position on my French language journey. Though I studied French for five years in high school and did a university exchange in France back in the day, I later went years without speaking it. Now that I’m back in France, I’ve had to relearn so many words and grammar rules that had lain dormant in my mind for so long. And so while I can speak it fairly fluently, I’m well aware of the holes in my knowledge that can trip me up at inconvenient times.
Here are some observations on French that I’ve made over the last ninety days. Bonne lecture !
Paroles, paroles, paroles: words with multiple meanings
Just like English words, many French words have multiple meanings. While there’s nothing mind-blowing about this, such words can still trip you up — especially when you’re used to hearing a word in one context and then you hear it being used in a completely different one.
To give an example, I’d learnt that gênant meant something like ‘awkward’, ‘uncomfortable’ or ‘embarrassing’. And so when I found a sign saying stationnement gênant, I initially read it as ‘embarrassing parking’. As it so turns out, gênant can also mean ‘in the way’, and so a better translation would be something like ‘In-the-way parking’ or ‘obstructive parking’ — or perhaps even ‘tow away area’. But as I didn’t know gênant’s other meanings at the time, my mind went straight to the only one I knew.
While that situation might seem pretty inconsequential, I found myself in a slightly more gênant situation when I ordered un bibimbap au boeuf à emporter at a restaurant near work. Just before I was about to pay, the restaurant owner asked me if I’d like des baguettes with my meal. “Non, ça va,” I said, because who on earth eats Korean food with baguettes? It was only later on, when I came back to the office and searched for some cutlery, that it dawned on me — he wasn’t talking about breadsticks, but chopsticks.
It might sound strange to non-native speakers, but in French, une baguette isn’t just a boulanger’s main source of income; it’s pretty much any long, thin, flexible stick. So while you can indeed buy une baguette tradition at your local boulangerie, you can also get baguettes in Chinese traiteurs, sushi shops, and wand stores. In fact, the word for ‘wand’ in Harry Potter is quite literally baguette magique — a choice of words that made Harry Potter et les reliques de la mort quite a strange reading experience. Somehow, Harry’s struggles against the dark forces of magic seem less poignant when he’s threatening his baguette at everyone.
Besides long sticks, I also recently discovered that whilst depuis can mean ‘since’ in the temporal sense of ‘Since February…’, it can also mean ‘from’ in the geographical sense (e.g. Depuis la Nouvelle-Zélande…). And though gratuit usually means ‘free’, it can also mean ‘gratuitous’. So while la plage can be gratuite, an idea for an ad can also be gratuite if it doesn’t communicate any particular advertising message.
Sorry not sorry: slippery translations
How can a French word mean the same thing as its English equivalent and yet still mean something else? The obvious answer is that words aren’t always 1:1 the same. And yet some words which you might think are universal across all languages can vary in surprising ways.
Take ‘sorry’. While the word certainly exists in French, it comes in different forms. Pardon is what you say when you’re trying to exit a packed métro carriage. Excusez-moi is what you say when you’re late to a Teams meeting. Désolé, on the other hand, seems more akin to a gnashing of the teeth, an outward confirmation of one’s dark night of the soul. I’m exaggerating, of course, but not by much. You see, whenever I say désolé, the response is more often than not an unreflective insistence that I needn’t be. Désolé, it seems, is simply stronger than sorry, which latter can often seem quite flimsy, or gratuit.
I suppose the difference between sorry and désolé is due in part to a difference in manners. In English, we tend to utter sorry as a matter of courtesy. We say sorry whenever we feel we may have wronged someone, or even when we haven’t. It’s basically an instant self-confession booth whose users cleanse their sins at the flick of the tongue. So whether we have or not is beside the point; it’s better to err on the side of caution than risk appearing rude and unapologetic. The result is that ‘sorry’ gets used so frequently that it’s become pretty much meaningless in and of itself. If ‘sorry’ is a Swiss-Army knife in the toolbox of politeness, its overuse has rendered it somewhat insincere.
But to call ‘sorry’ insincere wouldn’t be entirely fair, especially when you consider the purposes it serves. For example, if you were a soft drink seller and someone asked you if you sold beer and you didn’t sell it, it would be fairly polite to reply with ‘sorry’. You wouldn’t even need to say ‘no’, as the apology alone would imply as much. In French, however, a no-nonsense non would be perfectly adequate, and perhaps even expected. Indeed, saying désolé in such a circumstance might even strike the asker as bizarre, as they might see no reason for the seller to feel so contrite about something so trivial. I suppose you could say that this is because the word ‘no’ seems to be so much stronger in English than non is in French, and if you were to reply to that same scenario with a curt ‘no’, you would come across as strangely aggressive, as if you intensely disliked the question asker and/or perhaps wanted to start a fight with them. By using ‘sorry’, on the other hand, you can soften the ‘blow’ of not selling any beer, while still coming across as polite.
Désolé, on the other hand, requires genuine contrition, and so when someone utters it, it’s more akin to something like “I’m profoundly sorry for the wrong I have caused”. It’s a much higher stakes word, and so it’s not to be used lightly.
By the way: English as a cultural signifier
There’s a widely held belief that French people are nothing if not proud of their language. As the idea goes, the Académie Française was established in part to stop hordes of foreign words from invading France and sullying Molière’s tongue. But in my experience, nothing could be further from the truth. That’s not to say I haven’t met some people who embrace the Académie’s mission with unnerving zeal, but they tend to be few and far between. Instead, most people I meet seem pretty apt to sprinkle a handful of English words into their sentences — even in places where a French word would arguably make more sense.
Of course, I should point out that as I work in an ad agency, I’m in a very particular milieu. As the creative industries tend to be more global-minded and open to embracing cultural trends from overseas, advertising is a cultural outlier. So while franglais is used to varying degrees of enthusiasm by French people every day, in Adland it’s in overdrive. Although French remains the primary language, you turn to English when you want to sound dynamic, modern and clever. English is the language you use to watch Netflix, consult online articles, and connect with a global community.
No surprise, then, that colleagues would avail themselves of English words at every opportunity. Indeed, I’ve heard people use English words in ways that make little obvious sense to native English speakers. I’ve heard people begin sentences with “By the way” or “Hang on a minute”, followed by a whole sentence in French (e.g. ‘By the way, on a pas eu du temps de leur en parler.’) Then there’s the fact that ‘hello’ is often used as an email greeting (something I would never think to do), ‘sorry’ is used in the place of pardon (or perhaps even désolé), and phrases like travailler non-stop, en termes de deadlines, je suis pas très fan de ça, on a le go and il va le faire passer asap are pretty widespread.
I was also surprised to discover that words I had once viewed as faux amis, are simply used à l’anglaise. Though I had been taught that excité meant ‘aroused’, people at work talk about being excité all the time. And while très chaud isn’t exactly a faux ami, it would normally be viewed as such if an English speaker were to use it.
Fin
The words I’ve mentioned are the ones I’ve observed over the last three months. I’m sure there are plenty more that I’ve heard but didn’t catch or which went way above my head. I’m also typing all this on a French keyboard, and as I have an English keyboard at home, I’m forever switching between QWERTY and AZERTY, Q and A, W and Z, semicolon and full stop. My hope is that over the next three months, I’ll make more progress in French, and fewer keyboard-switching-induced typos.
