French à la française

For nearly two weeks I have now been living in France, even if I've the sense that it's been much longer. I feel as if I've been around a while, I couldn't say for how long exactly, but long enough to know some folks and not get lost. A few days ago somebody even recognized me; we'd been to the same book signing earlier in the week. Part of my feeling comfortable in Strasbourg is due to my having visited twice previously, and another part to my having been able to learn so much about French culture last year while living in Pavia. French and Belgian friends of mine, among which certain contributors to this blog, were magnanimous enough to give me a crash course in what it takes to be francophone. I learned where a word's stress unfailingly goes, how and when to inject allez into dialogue (loudly and always), and how to say "Qu'est-ce qu'on se fait chier dans ce trou!"

Now that I am spending my days here I have had the chance to get more thoroughly into the French language and into the heads of the French. What has struck me above all is their careering progress toward minimalism. This minimalism can be detected visually, given the relatively static lips of French speakers; aurally, with the diaphanous articulation of words; and linguistically, both formally, where an " î " indicates a lost "s," and informally, where one might find on Facebook something like the following (apologies to the person from whose page I mined this): "alr jsuis tiv-mo pr faire qqch." This "sentence," 24 letters, is what I will force myself to label neutrally a "minimization" of the following sentence, 37 letters: "alors je suis tiv-mo pour faire quelque chose," All right, I'm tiv-mo to do something. This is a 33% reduction, which would likely be greater were I able to decipher and reconstruct "tiv-mo."

This kind of linguistic hatchet-work has gained ground above all in spoken French, as well as the technological media which tend to mirror speech patterns (i.e., Facebook, text messaging), but also to a considerable extent in non-formal written French. My primary source is 20 Minutes, a free newspaper distributed in ten metropolitan areas, with a daily readership of 2,733,000. Below is a list I have compiled in the last 10 days:

écolo (écologique) — ecological

agglo (agglomération) — agglomeration

manif (manifestation) — manifestation

ado (adolescent) — adolescent

labo (laboratoire) — laboratory

collabo (collaboration) —collaboration

docu (documentaire) — documentary

coloc (colocataire) — roommate

What this list indicates is not an isolated practice of abbreviation among "ados", but a linguistic practice applied broadly across the language. The most surprising aspect to me is that these gnomish word forms are becoming (have become?) the new norm. You will not likely find "manif" in Le Monde, the leading French newspaper, but it becomes the standard model in 20 Minutes, which is free, but which treats serious issues and does so with otherwise-orthodox grammatical standards.

Another sector in which French minimization is making grand steps is with embracing negation. This concept is a form of the double negative in which two negating words bookend a verb. Thus, I don't want a car in French becomes I don't want no car, Je ne veux pas une voiture. This kind of double negative, which makes for poor English according to the grammatical standards of today, is instead de rigueur in French.

Yet this rule is losing purchase. The indicators are to be found, as usual, in spoken French. The ne … pas construction remains obligatory in written language, but colloquially the "ne" often falls away, even from the mouths of the educated. So we get Je veux pas une voiture, "I want no car," or C'est pas grave, "It's not that bad." This last has become an idiomatic expression with its single negator, such that it might even sound odd to say it with embracing negation.

So where will French go from here? Predicting the future course of a language is an inexact science, but given the commonness of single negation in spoken French, I suspect that within a century or two, it will also become the standard in written expression. We, the anglophones, can look to our own language as evidence: in the epoch of Middle English, we had embracing negation, too, using none other than "ne." It was not until the grammatical housekeeping of the 18th century that double negatives became a no-no. Place your bets, then, on the extinction of ne … pas. Old grammarians die, and new ones grow up with single negation. C'est pas grave, hein ?

Westley Aubergine

For reference: Blooming English: Observations on the roots, cultivation and hybrids of the English language, by Kate Burridge.