Franglais: The English in French, and the Fight Against It

Franglais is French with English mixed into it. The word has been an insult, a joke and a genuine political argument for sixty years, and it describes something meaningfully different from the Spanish-English contact most learners have heard about. This piece covers what franglais actually is, the false anglicisms that trap learners, why Quebec resists harder than France, and which borrowings you can safely use.

Borrowing, not switching

The important structural point first, because it is where most comparisons go wrong. Spanish-English contact in the United States produces sustained code-switching: whole clauses alternate between languages inside a single conversation, by speakers who control both grammars.

French-English contact mostly does not do that. What French does is borrow, heavily, at the level of the word:

• Ce weekend, on va faire du shopping.
• J'ai un job d'été dans un fast-food.
• Envoie-moi un mail, c'est plus cool.
• Il faut checker le planning avant le meeting.

Every one of those sentences is French. The grammar is French throughout, the borrowed items sit in ordinary French noun and verb slots, and the verbs take French conjugations: je checke, tu zappes, il like, nous googlons. That is borrowing behaving normally, not two grammars running at once.

The reason matters. Sustained code-switching needs two languages with real institutional weight in the same community, spoken by the same people all day. That describes Los Angeles, which is why Spanglish behaves so differently. It does not describe Lyon, where English is a school subject and a professional tool rather than the language of the shop on the corner.

The false anglicisms, which are the real trap

This is the section worth reading twice, because it is where confident learners come unstuck. French has borrowed English-shaped words and then used them for something else entirely.

The danger is precisely that they look familiar. A learner reads un smoking and does not stop, because nothing signalled that a stop was needed. Compare an ordinary unknown French word, which at least announces itself.

Note the pattern in several of these: English gerunds have been borrowed as concrete nouns. Footing, brushing, pressing, dressing, lifting, camping. Once you spot that shape you can predict roughly where the trap will be.

The official resistance, and how it has gone

French language policy is unusually organised, and it is worth understanding what the different institutions actually do.

The Académie française, founded in the seventeenth century, issues opinions and maintains a dictionary. It has cultural authority and no legal power whatsoever, which is a distinction routinely lost in English-language reporting.

The Toubon law of 1994 does have force, and applies to advertising, commercial contracts, workplace documents and broadcast media. It governs commercial and official usage, not private speech. Nobody is fined for saying le weekend.

The Commission d'enrichissement de la langue française coins French replacements for incoming foreign terms and publishes them in the Journal officiel. Its record is genuinely mixed, and the pattern of hits and misses is instructive:

• Ordinateur for computer. Total success, so complete that its origin as a deliberate coinage is forgotten.
• Logiciel for software. Same, and now unremarkable.
• Courriel for email. Broadly successful in writing and dominant in Quebec, though un mail remains common in French speech.
• Mot-dièse for hashtag. Failed. Everyone says hashtag.
• Baladodiffusion for podcast. Widely used in Quebec, largely ignored in France, where podcast won.

The lesson in that list is about timing rather than patriotism. When the French word arrives with the thing, it wins. When it arrives ten years after everyone has already named the thing in English, it does not, and no amount of official standing changes that.

Quebec inverts the stereotype

Learners generally arrive expecting France to be the strict one. It is not.

Quebec's Office québécois de la langue française is far more interventionist than anything in metropolitan France, and Quebec speech follows it much more closely. The reason is not that Quebec loves French more. It is that Quebec is a French-speaking society of a few million inside an English-speaking continent of hundreds of millions, and the pressure is not theoretical. Metropolitan France can borrow le weekend cheerfully because nothing about French in France is actually at risk.

That is worth holding onto if you are choosing which variety to learn: the anglicisms are one of the clearer everyday differences between the two, and using French ones in Montreal will mark you instantly.

What a learner should actually do

Use the borrowings French speakers use. Le weekend, le parking, un mail, cool. Avoiding them in France sounds like someone reciting a textbook rather than speaking.

Do not invent your own. Reaching for an English word French has not borrowed, with a French accent and a hopeful expression, is the single most obvious learner tell there is. If you do not know the French word, describe your way round it. That is a skill worth building anyway.

Watch the register. In writing, in exams, and in anything professional, prefer the French term. Courriel or message over mail, logiciel over software, mot-clé over keyword. The borrowings are casual-register items and using them in a formal document reads as sloppy rather than modern.

Get the core French in place first. Anglicisms are a surface layer on a language you still have to know: the 1,000 most common French words do most of the work, and French vocabulary by CEFR level sets out what each level actually demands.

Learn the false anglicisms as vocabulary, not as cognates. Un smoking, un footing, un brushing. Treat them as ordinary new words that happen to be spelled like English ones, because that is exactly what they are.