This came about after Terri Dunne posted a link on Facebook to an article from theweek.com snappily entitled 11 mots merveilleux recently added to the French dictionary.
Are you still following this?
Good.
The article gives examples of new French words added to the 2014 edition of the Petit Robert.
I am always fascinated by "new" words so I decided to see if I could find some more.
Quite by accident, I found some more new words on the BBC's 7 day quiz page.
These words are:
- beuverie express - binge drinking
- mot-diese - hashtag
- tablette - Ipad (or any tablet device, I suppose)
This, of course, is the work of our old friends at L'Academie Française.
For those of you who are not aware of L'Academie Française, it is the French body responsible for all matters to do with the French language.
The members of L'Academie Française are referred to as the immortels, which probably says a lot about their opinion of themselves. I digress...
Its role is only advisory, but it will persist in telling the French what they should and should not say, particularly when it comes to borrowing words from other languages.
L'Academie Française has a regularly updated blog (or as they would have it, "cybercarnet") to which correct French versions of adopted phrases appear, with examples.
The blog is called:
and is an invaluable resource for any teacher or higher level student of French.
I like it best of all because it gives me examples of phrases used by the French which foreigners would never get to hear as the French media tends to follow the rules of the Academie.
For example, I had never heard the term Speedez-vous as a replacement for Dépêchez-vous but apparently it is used a lot.
So if you want to learn how to speak French like a real French person, the place to go to find the "bad words" is the place dedicated to keeping the language pure.
How ironic!
1 comment:
Dire, Ne Pas Dire - c'est très intéressant! Thanks for telling me about it.
I was interested to hear "Je vais checker là-bas" in France last week.
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