With more than 320 million speakers globally, French is the world's fifth most-spoken language. But traditionalists complain that spelling, grammar and vocabulary are on the decline. On International French Language Day, one linguist tells RFI that change isn't just inevitable – it's healthy.
“French is just fine because it’s spoken on every continent, which is rare for a language,” says Christophe Benzitoun, a lecturer in linguistics at the University of Lorraine.
“There are several hundred million speakers, which shows that the language is doing well, it’s widely spoken, widely taught.
“So there’s no need to worry about its vitality in the short or medium term, about the number of speakers, its ability to adapt to new technologies or anything else.”
Some 321 million speak French worldwide, according to the French Language Observatory’s latest estimate from 2022.
With around half of those speakers in Africa, a third in Europe and others in the Americas, the Caribbean, Asia and Oceania, its footprint is broader than Chinese or Hindi – which have more total speakers but are concentrated on a single continent.
Only English and Spanish – like French, languages of European empires that colonised much of the globe – can compete for geographical spread.
So why do so many people believe that French is on the decline?
Struggles with spelling
The latest Pisa study of education, which measures the school results of 15-year-olds across 81 countries, found that reading scores in 2022 were among the lowest ever recorded in France, after a decade of consistent decline.
They nonetheless remain in line with the average for other members of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
National tests, meanwhile, found that while around half of 11- to 12-year-olds showed satisfactory comprehension of spoken and written French at the start of the 2022 school year, fewer than 40 percent had adequate mastery of spelling or grammar.
In fact, nearly 35 percent of pupils were judged to be so behind on spelling that they needed special assistance.
Successive education ministers have vowed to tackle literacy levels, including by mandating extra reading and writing time for primary school pupils and daily dictation exercises.
But linguist Benzitoun argues that, however many hours schools have dedicated to it over the years, students have always struggled to spell French; it’s a feature of the language itself.
Two separate languages
Other European languages including Spanish and German have updated their spelling as pronunciation changes, he explains, keeping the written language closer to the way words sound today.
Yet French is still spelled the same way it was when it was spoken very differently – with the result that many of the grammatical markers required in “proper” written French don’t show up in the spoken language.
“For example, plural markers for nouns and adjectives, which we mark in writing with an S. For the most part you don’t hear these markers at all in spoken language,” says Benzitoun, who specialises in the difference between written and oral French.
Linguists have been campaigning since the 1980s for written French to be modernised, and in 1990 some limited reforms were introduced (though not universally adopted).
“We haven’t updated in line with the pronunciation, or perhaps a little at the edges but not at all systematically,” Benzitoun says.
“And now we’re a good century and a half behind compared to the evolution of pronunciation.”
Language purists
France has proved more resistant to linguistic change than many other countries. In one 2016 survey, 82 percent of respondents said they disapproved of the 1990 attempt at reform.
Subsequent evolutions have also met with handwringing by French intellectuals and institutions – none louder than the Academie Française, the profoundly conservative institution that since 1635 has claimed to safeguard the French language.
Over the decades it has opposed everything from recognition of regional languages in France to the use of feminine forms of job titles for women doctors, MPs, teachers and the like.
One of its most dogged battles is against the importation of English words, which members have claimed threatens not just France’s language but society itself.
“It’s this fantasy vision of the language as pure and perfect in a certain era, which doesn’t make any sense from a linguistic point of view,” responds Benzitoun.
By clinging onto centuries-old conventions at all costs, language purists want to turn French into “a sort of pristine museum that no one can touch”, he says.
“It’s a misunderstanding of how languages work and the very definition of what language is. Languages are made to be used by the people speaking them, to adapt to the time in which they’re spoken – and if that’s not the case then there’s no reason for them to exist.”
Fossilising French would lead it to the same fate as Latin, he warns. “Trying to go backwards would be like signing the language’s death warrant.”
Whose language is French anyway?
Language conservatism is also at odds with a goal to which France devotes more than €600 million each year: promoting French worldwide.
“Part of the reason why English has spread is that there’s no one policing the language. People speak differently in the UK and the US and it’s not a problem,” observes Benzitoun.
“Yet for French there’s a sort of centralisation – there’s a myth of ‘proper French’ that’s spoken in Paris and the surrounding region, which in fact limits its spread as a global language.
“It’s paradoxical to seek, on the one hand, a language that’s more and more widely spoken, with a certain freedom in how people express themselves, with significant variations in how they speak, and this desire for centralisation and ‘proper French’. You have to choose one or the other.”
French President Emmanuel Macron has shown himself to be more progressive in this area than some of his predecessors, declaring in 2018: “France must take pride in being ultimately a country among others which learns, speaks and writes in French.”
His government backed an online dictionary of world French that aims to reflect the diversity of a language spoken from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Canada.
Benzitoun believes that incorporating expressions from elsewhere can only make French richer. He points to the example of “enjailler”, “to have fun” or “party”: invented in French-speaking West Africa, the verb now appears in standard French dictionaries.
He’s one of 19 linguists behind a recent treatise titled “Le français va très bien, merci” (“French is doing just fine, thanks”), designed to counter the doomsayers.
“I have faith in French speakers and I have faith in the French language,” Benzitoun says.
“If a term is invented and it spreads widely, that suggests it’s useful. It must serve to enrich the language and express a new reality, something we couldn’t express before. It’s nothing but positive.”
