Pourquoi tout le monde is parlezing about Franglais

‘Prenez un grip’ and ‘donnez-moi un break’, Boris Johnson told French president Emmanuel Macron during a diplomatic row last week. Is the PM as sketchy on the finer points of French as he is on so much else?

Not at all, he’s fluent thanks to his Brussels schooldays. But his use of the English-French hybrid Franglais is likely to appeal to Brits who aren’t much cop at learning a second language while winding up Monsieur Macron by mangling his precious mother tongue.

So Franglais n’est pas une idée nouvelle?

It’s been around since the Norman Conquest introduced French words into Anglo-Saxon, and was used humorously by Chaucer, Shakespeare (in Henry V) and Mark Twain. A recent book, Tommy French, described how uneducated British soldiers fighting alongside the French in First World War trenches used approximations such as ‘silver plate’ for ‘please’.

And in modern times?

Franglais was popularised by Miles Kington in newspaper columns and books in the 1970s. He said that if you had a basic qualification in French, Franglais was ‘un morceau de gâteau’ – simply employ as many French words as you can, fill the rest with English if you don’t know ‘le mot juste’ then speak with absolute conviction. His examples include a door-todoor salesman who assured customers: ‘Je ne suis pas un nutter religious’. And Franglais has been used comically by everyone from Monty Python to Del Boy. Mange tout, Rodney!

Do the French use Franglais?

Across La Manche, ‘Franglais’ means the adoption of English words, a corruption much hated by the country’s linguistic guardians. They famously dislike ‘un talkie-walkie’ and ‘le weekend’ and tried to ban ‘podcast’ in favour of ‘diffusion pour baladeur’ (broadcast for the walker). In multilingual Cameroon, the hybrid Camfranglais is widely spoken by urban youths. One example: ‘ To u t le monde hate me, wey I no know pourquoi.’