Franglais

Readers of Rick On Theater will know that when I was a teen and a twenty-something, I lived in Europe two times.  The second time, on which I’ve blogged often, was when I was in the army in West Berlin, Germany, from 1971 to ’74.  The first time, from 1962 to ’67, my father was a Foreign Service Officer assigned to the Federal Republic and my family accompanied him there.  (See my two-part post “An American Teen in Germany,” posted on 9 and 12 March 2013.) 

My younger brother and I went to school in Switzerland starting in the fall of 1963.  I spent my last two years of high school in Switzerland, attending the Collège du Léman in Versoix-Geneva for my junior year (CDL; Lac Léman is the French name for Lake Geneva) and graduating from the International School of Geneva (École Internationale de Genève, or Écolint). 

I spoke mostly English in class, but everything else—dorm life, the dining hall, interactions with the staff, going off campus into the little town of Versoix or to downtown Geneva—was in French. 

(Both schools had an English “side” and a French “side.”  The English side accommodated both American curricula, aimed toward the SAT’s [Scholastic Aptitude Tests], and British, preparing for the GCE’s [General Certificate of Education, known since 1988 as the GCSE’s—General Certificate of Secondary Education]. 

(Students on the French side took the Baccalauréat, or the “Bac”—possibly one of the hardest national school-leaving exams ever conceived.  French-speaking students could also prepare for Switzerland’s Maturité, but since the Swiss public education system was excellent, we only had a very small number of Swiss citizens among the student body.  One, interestingly enough, was Dominique Lindt, the scion of the world-famous chocolatier family.)

Even though the instruction was in either French or English—some international schools, especially those in German Switzerland such as Le Rosey in Gstaad, also had German-language classes and those students prepared for the Abitur, Germany’s secondary school-leaving certificate—the student body was much more nationally diverse than that.

At CDL and, especially, Écolint, I had schoolmates from Ghana, Guinea, India, the PRC, Japan, Turkey, Kuwait, Iran, plus a bunch of kids with mixed national backgrounds (Swedish-Mexican, Japanese-Austrian).  There were also many students who spoke not just two languages, but three and even four.  I was getting pretty fluent in French and German, but I had schoolmates who far outstripped my paltry efforts!

(I knew many teenagers and adults who were bilingual—I was not, just very fluent—but I only knew one person who was actually trilingual.  She wasn’t a schoolmate, but the daughter of my dad’s boss in Germany, and she spoke English, French, and German all equally well, like a native-born speaker.  I knew of a few others, including two little children, but this girl—she was a couple of years younger than I—was the only trilingual person I knew personally.)

In social settings, we all spoke a combination of French and English (sometimes with smatterings of other languages thrown in) among ourselves, with the French-speaking kids using more French than English and the English-speakers, vice versa,.  This was the lingua franca of Swiss international-school students called Franglais.   Most people know that that’s a sort of pastiche of français and anglais and we spoke it among ourselves all the time.

(Franglais is a “portmanteau word”—a term that’s a bit of Franglais in itself—a mash-up of parts of two other words, like ‘televangelist’ or ‘animatronics.’)

Let’s tackle the technical stuff first.

According to Wikipedia, Franglais is a macaronic mixture of French and English.  That’s a blend of languages using bilingual puns and hybrid words (comprised of part French and part English).  The two languages are used within the same phrases or sentences, not separated into passages in each language (such as a French quotation within an English paragraph).

Wikipedia also says that the word was first used in France (where it’s written franglais—with a small f) as a “denunciation of the overuse of English words in French.”  The Académie Française (established in 1635), or the French Academy, the official guardian of the purity of the French language, became exercised in the 1950s at the extensive voguish adoption of English vocabulary into spoken French; words like le parking for ‘parking lot’, le camping for  . . well, ‘camping,’ and le building for ‘apartment house’ or ‘high rise.’ 

The Academy mandated long, periphrastic terms like le terrain de stationnement for the parking lot and la maison d’habitation or la maison de plusieurs pièces for the apartment house; le camping got a bye.  So did le weekend: almost no Frenchman or -woman says la fin de la semaine!

As French journalist Agnès Poirier (b. 1975), who splits her time between Paris and London, says, the watchdogs of le français pur are usually too late.  By the time they’ve ordained new French terms, “The man in the street will have already adopted English words to describe new trends.”

The sense of Franglais we use, the common meaning in English, is the combination of French and English.  The mash-up was used humorously or occasionally to seem sophisticated by dropping foreign words or phrases—French for the English-speakers, English for the Francophones) into the conversation.  Sometimes it could jump over a vocabulary gap or even serve as a way for someone not fluent in French to communicate with a French person who doesn’t speak English. 

(This is often called “menu French”; in Germany, its counterpart was also called Putzfrau Deutsch—‘cleaning-woman German’—because it’s how Americans living in Germany who hadn’t learned enough German communicated with domestic workers.  Both are accompanied by a lot of pointing, gestures, and impromptu sign language.)

As international students in Geneva, my schoolmates and I used Franglais as our semiprivate language just among ourselves.  We never spoke Franglais with Genevans or the school staff.  That was always in French, however halting it might be at first. 

(There were exceptions—not to using Franglais, but to speaking French with the adults—at least for me.  At CDL, for instance, the school secretary and the school nurse were both Swiss German.  Fräulein Ursula, the nurse, spoke French, of course, and Herr Peter spoke French and English, but I usually spoke German with them.)

Basically, speaking Franglais was a goof for us.  Almost all of us could get along reasonably well in French pretty soon after we arrived at school.  It’s hard when you’re immersed in a French-speaking world like we were not to pick up the language fast—at least not at our ages.  But Franglais was sort of “our” language. 

It wasn’t secret, of course; almost everyone around us—the adults, I mean—could easily understand both parts of Franglais.  That’s why I say it was a goof.  We spoke it because we could.  Since to some degree we all spoke both languages—in cases like mine, more and more fluently as time went by—we could show off in a way by messing with them. 

You know what it’s like?  Jack Benny’s awful violin-playing, Victor Borge’s silly piano-playing, and W. C. Fields’s comic pool-shooting.  Benny and Borge were excellent musicians and Fields, an expert at pool—so they all could fool around with their talents because they were so good at them.  We were all good at speaking two languages and we demonstrated that, as much to each other as to anyone else, by playing around with them.

At least that’s how I looked at Franglais.

Incidentally, it wasn’t just at school that I used Franglais.  I’ve occasionally written about my friend Marc Humilien, a French teen who also lived in Koblenz, the small German city where my dad was first posted in 1962.  Marc’s father was the military doctor of a small contingent of French troops stationed in Koblenz.  Marc, his younger sister Marion, and I became great friends and hung out like teens do—except they spoke French and I spoke English. 

Little by little, though, I learned enough French to get by—as long as we could toss in a few English and German words and phrases.  Franglais (with the addition of a dollop of German) became our means of communication—at least until my French got better than Marc’s and Marion’s English.

(As I confessed in my blog article “The Rhine in Flames,” posted on ROT on 13 November 2019, back in the ’60s, my family and I took to using many German words, names, and expressions among ourselves, a kind of Denglisch, you might say. 

(In our house, for example, a chest was a Schrank, a common soft drink was Limonade—not lemonade, but a lemon-lime soda like 7 Up—and a fruit juice we liked was Johannesbeerensaft, even when we were speaking English.  The same went for things like the name of the state in which we were living, the Rhineland-Palatinate, which we routinely called the Rheinland-Pfalz; the Elector’s palace was the Schloss, and the Mosel River was always the Mosel and not the Moselle, and so on.  When Mom and Dad went for a walk along the Rhine after dinner, they went spaziering or out for a Spazier.)

Franglais is an odd duck of a pseudo-language.  It can be using French words in an English context, such as in a phrase I made up as a very novice speaker of French as a sort of joke: Je ne touche jamais l’étouffe.  It’s a direct translation of the English phrase ‘I never touch the stuff’—except étouffe is ‘stuff’ in the meaning of ‘cram’ or ‘jam.’  No Frenchman would ever utter such a sentence! 

A classmate of mine at Écolint, who by the time I knew him spoke fluent and colloquial French, told me and my roommate how he formed the French versions of common English expressions when he was just learning the language.  One he thought was particularly funny was ‘I give up,’ which came out je donne monte: je donne is ‘I give,’ but my friend didn’t know how to say ‘up’ in this context, so he made up the word monte from monter, ‘to mount’ or ‘to climb.’  (In French, the idiom would probably come out j’abandonne, but it would depend on what you were giving up—an idea, a thing, or territory.)

In Franglais, you could also slip in an English word you’ve “frankified,” or made to fit French syntax.  An example would be Je vais driver en ville for ‘I’m going to drive into town.”  Driver is, of course, not a French word at all, but the English word ‘drive’ modified to fit French grammar.  Another common one we said often is J’agree, the meaning of which I think is obvious.  We’d also say, Je n’agree pas for the reverse.

(French doesn’t have a special verbal ending for forming a French verb from a foreign word.  Perhaps that’s because, as we’ve seen, the French frown on the practice.  But both German and Russian do have such a suffix: -ieren and –ovat’ [-овать].  So: integrieren, ‘to integrate’ and vandalisieren, ‘to vandalize’ in German; and integrirovatʹ, ‘to integrate’ and atakovat’, ‘to attack’ in Russian.  Theoretically, you can make up a German or Russian verb from an English word by adding the appropriate suffix—French not so much—though you may have trouble getting anyone to understand it!)

In the British Broadcasting Corporation obituary for Miles Kington (1941-2008), a British humor columnist whom the BBC credited with coining the name Franglais, journalist Neil Hallows sums up the “rules” of the pseudo-language:

Its rules are simple.  Insert as many French words as you know into the sentence, fill in the rest with English, then speak it with absolute conviction.

(Wikipedia calls Kington the inventor of Franglais, but since he didn’t start writing about it in the pages of Punch, the British humor magazine, until the late 1970s, he couldn’t have invented the patois or even coined the name.  It clearly existed long before I arrived in Europe in 1963—two years before Kington even joined the staff of Punch—but I was using it and calling it Franglais from the time I started at CDL on.  And I certainly didn’t invent the hybrid language or give it its name.)

It’s important to note, however, that merely using a French word or expression in English isn’t in itself Franglais.  We have hundreds of French loan-words and adopted phrases in English that we hardly think of as French anymore. 

Crochet, à la carte, repertoire, au pair, séance, film noir, mise-en-scène, cul-de-sac, and c’est la vie! are just a handful of French terms we use almost daily.  Using these words in an English conversation isn’t speaking Franglais; it’s just English.  Franglais refers to dropping non-standard French terms into your English to make some kind of impression.  

In addition to his columns on the subject, Kington wrote at least five books on Franglais.  Among his examples, just to give you all an idea of what the parlance is all about, are:

•   Le Phone-in Programme: Je ne suis pas un bon sleeper, Brian, et votre programme me donne une sorte de company

•   A la Douane [customs]: Black Pudding n’est pas tax-free

•   Le job interview: Vous êtes exactement le go-ahead personal assistant que je cherche

•   Le hangover: Il y a un petit homme dans ma tête, qui fait le demolition work

(From Let’s Parler Franglais! (1979) and Let’s Parler Franglais Again! (1980), cited in the BBC obit.  I added the italics.)

Arguably, the most recognizable fictional practitioner of Franglais in pop culture is Miss Piggy of the Muppets.  She constantly uses  moi to refer to herself and drops French phrases like mon petit cheri into her dialogue all in her attempt to seem glamorous.

One of the most famous examples of Franglais—and one of the most amusing—was humorist Art Buchwald’s annual column in the Paris Herald Tribune (and, therefore, the Washington Post) explaining Thanksgiving to the French.  Buchwald (1925-2007) published the first Thanksgiving column in 1952, when he was living and writing in Paris (1949-62), and it proved so popular that he reran it every year after that until the end of his career.  It was still appearing on Thanksgiving Day while I was living in Europe—we got the Paris Trib daily—and it always slayed me, even as a teenager!

I can’t reprint the entire column here (you can read a late copy of it online at https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/23/AR2005112302056.html), but some of his bilingual puns included his opening comment: “One of our most important holidays is Thanksgiving Day, known in France as le Jour de Merci Donnant”—literally ‘the Day of Thanks Giving,’ but the further joke is . . . the holiday wasn’t known at all in France. 

Except for Canada, which has a similar holiday in October, no other country knew or even cared about Thanksgiving Day!  (In Quebec, the holiday’s called Le Jour de l’Action de grâce [literally, ‘The day of the action of thanks’].)

In other jokes, Buchwald rendered Miles Standish as “Kilometres Deboutish” (debout is French for ‘standing’) and translated the phrase “a  man . . . of action” as “un vieux Fanfan la Tulipe”, a reference to a 1952 French swashbuckler film.  When Priscilla Mullens tells “Jean Alden,” "Why don't you speak for yourself, Jean?" Buchwald translated the line as, “Chacun à son goût,” which means simply, ‘To each his own’ or, literally, ‘Everyone to his taste.’

There are plenty of examples in literature of variations on Franglais.  An early reference to a kind of Franglais, dubbed Cockney French, was in The Canterbury Tales (published c. 1400) by Geoffrey Chaucer (c.  1343-1400).  In the “General Prologue,” Chaucer introduces The Prioress who uses French as a mark of her social standing, but as she never heard Parisian French, she mispronounces the foreign words in the manner of Stratford-at-Bow, the London site of her priory in the traditional Cockney area of the city. 

A later classical writer, William Shakespeare (1564-1616), composed a scene of Franglais—though the word was yet to be invented at the time—in  Henry V (1599).  In Act 3, Scene 4, Katharine, a French princess, is trying to learn English; the scene is largely in French with a lady attending on the princess, who’d been to England, teaching her some English words

Alice: La main?  Elle est appellée de hand.

Katharine: De hand.  Et les doigts?

Alice: Les doigts—ma foi, j’oublie les doigts!  Mais je me souviendrai: les doigts, je pense qu’ils sont appellés de fingres.  Oui, de fingres. 

Then the princess discovers that “foot,” as Alice mispronounces it, sounds like foutre (argot [French slang] for ‘cum,’ or, as a verb, ‘to cum’) and “gown” (written as “coun”) comes out like con (‘cunt’; often used to mean ‘idiot’).  Katharine decides that English is too mauvais (‘naughty’) for her to speak!

Incidentally, the quasi-English “fingres” is usually pronounced as if it were a French word, with a nasal fin-, no shwa-sound between the g and the r, and the -es silent.  Alice’s English is a tad off, but her French isn’t standard, either:  The whole scene was a sort of proto-Franglais, but the French alone would have been hard for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s audience to follow, I imagine.

In Innocents Abroad (1869), Mark Twain (1835-1910) is well known for having made fun of German (he was disappointed, for instance, to learn that the word damit—the German conjunction ‘so’—is pronounced in German with the stress on the second syllable: da-MIT).  He did the same thing for French.  In a letter datelined Paris, 7 July, written by a young acquaintance named Blucher, the humorist “quotes”:

Monsieur le Landlord—Sir:  Pourquoi don’t you mettez some savon in your bed-chambers?  Est-ce que vous pensez I will steal it?  La nuit passée you charged me pour deux chandelles when I only had one; hier vous avez charged me avec glace when I had none at all; tout les jours you are coming some fresh game or other on me, mais vous ne pouvez pas play this savon dodge on me twice.  Savon is a necessary de la vie to any body but a Frenchman, et je l’aurai hors de cet hotel or make trouble.  You hear me.  Allons.

It’s pure Franglais!  (This time, the italics were Twain’s.)

Pop songs have been repositories of Franglais as well.  When I was living in Europe in the early and middle ’60s, the French were mad for American pop music. 

(So were the Brits, of course, which is what spawned the Beatles and the subsequent British Invasion of the middle and latter part of the decade.  The Germans liked American pop, too, but they were partial in the early years to “cowboy songs”—what country music was called before it was dubbed “country and western”—because they were fascinated with cowboys and our mythical Wild West.  See my repost of Rivka Galchen’s New Yorker article “Wild West Germany,” 15 September 2012.)

The French had their own proto-rockers and pop stars: Johnny Hallyday (1943-2017), Sylvie Vartan (b. 1944), Hugues Aufray (b. 1929), and Françoise Hardy (b. 1944), among others.  (Vartan and Hardy, along with a string of other pretty, young female singers, were called the Yé-Yé Girls—not a group, but a musical movement of the turn of the decade.)

British singer Petula Clark (b. 1932) was a kind of special case.  She sang in both English and French and after her 1964 international hit “Downtown” topped charts all over the world, she also released a French version, “Dans le temps,” the next year. 

“Downtown” wasn’t Clark’s first French-language recording and she also recorded versions of the song in Italian and Spanish.  “Dans le temps,” however, charted in the U.K. alongside the English original.  The French lyrics are somewhat awkward—they don’t retranslate well—and for the title line Dans le temps, which means ‘in time’ or ‘in the time,’ Clark had to swallow the le to make the words fit.

The main difference between the French and other Continental music scenes was that the French liked their own singers while, say, Germans listened to American and British pop groups and solos.  (The Beatles famously recorded two of their early hits, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You,” both 1963, in German translation [“Komm, gib mir deine Hand” and “Sie liebt dich,” 1964] as a thank-you to their German fans who had welcomed them in early gigs in Hamburg before they became internationally famous.)

The French pop songs were in French, or largely in French, and often included French versions of American hits.  Aufray, for instance, had a hit of his own with “Pends-moi” (1964; the French title means ‘hang me’), a cover of Roger Miller’s 1964 single “Dang Me.”  Clark covered many American pop hits in French, including “Ceux qui ont un coeur” from 1964 (Dionne Warwick’s “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” 1963) and 1966’s “La nuit n’en finit plus” (Jackie de Shannon’s “Needles and Pins,” 1963).

All these recordings were entirely in French, but the impulse to mix French language with English-language pop and rock ’n’ roll was also incorporated in combo songs—Franglais set to music, as it were.

Charles Aznavour (1923-2018), the great French tenor sometimes dubbed the French Frank Sinatra, wrote the music for and sang the 1963 hit “For me . . . formidable” (with lyrics by Jacques Plante, 1920-2003).  The song illustrates the difficulty a French singer encounters singing a love song to an English girl.  Aside from the title lyric, “You are the one for me, for me, formi, formidable” (I did the italics again), there are also other lines in Franglais:

My daisy, daisy, dési, désirable

Toi, tes eyes, ton nose, tes lips adorables

Avec ton air canaille, canaille, canaille / How can I love you?

In 1965, the Fab Four (aka The Beatles) released “Michelle” (Paul McCartney, b. 1942, and John Lennon, 1940-80).  Another love song, this time by an English boy to a French girl.  The opening lines are: “Michelle, ma belle./ These are words that go together well / My Michelle” (again with the italics). 

The quartet continues by singing the same sentiment in French: “Michelle, ma belle./ Sont des mots qui vont très bien ensemble / Très bien ensemble.”  Those are “the only words I know that / You’ll understand,” the boy sings, so he repeats them until “I'll get to you somehow.”

1974’s “Lady Marmalade,” written by Bob Crewe (1930-2014) and Kenny Nolan (b. c. 1951) and recorded by the American girl group Labelle (Patti LaBelle, b. 1944; Nona Hendryx, b. 1944; and Sarah Dash, b. 1945), became famous for its sexually suggestive chorus, “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi (ce soir)?” which is French for “Do you want to sleep with me (tonight)?” 

Inspired by Crewe’s experiences in New Orleans and the sex workers in the Big Easy, the 1974 release reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for a week and made Labelle one of the hottest girl groups of the ’70s.  “Lady Marmalade” went on to become part of the soundtrack of the 2001 film Moulin Rouge (in a cover by Christina Aguilera, b. 1980; Mýa, b. 1979; Pink, b. 1979; and Lil’ Kim, b. 1975) and the score of its 2018 stage-musical adaptation.

The song’s lyrics are mostly nonsense lines, a sort of post-modern scat.  The French line, the only one in the song, is repeated over and over again until it becomes a kind of litany.  Even in translation, it has nothing much to do with the rest of the song—which is largely gibberish anyway.  But it’s catchy.

The Rolling Stones’ Bill Wyman’s “(Si Si) Je Suis un Rock Star” came along in 1981.  The title itself is Franglais, of course.  The song reached 14 on the British charts and stayed for nine weeks, but it only reached 69 on the U.S. Billboard chart.  It has a refrain that’s pure Franglais (the italics are mine again):

Je suis un rock star

Je avais un residence

Je habiter la

A la south of France

Voulez vous

Partir with me?

And come and rester la

With me in France

Note how the French subject pronouns (je) aren’t elided before verbs that start with vowels or vowel sounds as they should be in correct French (j’avais, j’habiter)—and the verbs aren’t conjugated properly for the syntax.  It’s more like Shakespeare’s faux-French than Twain’s Franglais.

Translated into English, the song’s title means “(If) I am a rock star.”  According to an article in the  Tampa Bay (Florida) Times, the song’s narrative is that a middle aged Wyman (b. 1936) meets a young and beautiful woman from Rio de Janeiro and tries to tempt her back to France, where he lives.

Official France—the government agencies, the RTF (French television and radio), and official documents—eschews Franglais by Academy decree, but the French people love it.  In Canada’s Province of Quebec, Franglais is officially banned, but on the streets, it’s a way of life.  Forms of Franglais have even become codified in French-speaking countries outside of Europe such as Camaroon in Africa. 

Among Americans and Brits abroad, using Franglais in French company is considered by many Francophones to be an insult and a put-down, even as they use a form of it themselves daily.  (Anglophones don’t seem to have the same objections to the French—or anyone else—absconding with their language.  In fact, many Brits and Americans often seem downright amused at the phenomenon.)

When my schoolmates and peers spoke Franglais, however, not only wasn’t it ever done as an affront to the French or the Swiss Romands, it wasn’t really for public consumption at all.  Far from being an insult, it was an unwitting homage.  We were living in French-speaking territory, so we used as much French as we could—even when we were ostensibly speaking English.  It just seemed natural under the circumstances. 

And, yes, it was a way of showing off, like Miss Piggy—but not so much for seeming glamorous or sophisticated.  We were being “international”!

Avez-vous got it?  That’s bon!