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Main Content
Hybrids - Not Just Cars?
Language purity has long been a point of debate, but do linguistic restrictions have a place in the globalised world?
In 1994 France introduced the Toubon Law. Named for Jacques Toubon, the Minister of Culture at the time the law was passed, it cemented the use of French in all official and less than official matters on the territory of the country. Subjecting foreign language movies and films to quotas, the intention of the law is to ensure that French is not lost in an increasingly Anglicanised world.
While it has been criticised as an attempt to preserve the status of French as a lingua franca, French is not the only language corrupted by the increasingly common incorporation of English words. Whether this is just a side effect of a shift in the international code of communicating or a bastardising of linguistics remains a point of contention. The reality is that despite efforts across the board, in many matters English is the most dominant in multinational scenarios.
While the French have shown a clear reluctance to accepting that certain vocabulary just sounds more natural in English, with walkman, or rather baladeur, being a prime example, other languages have been more willing to adopt foreign phrases. Spanglish, for example, may have been a flop film, but the hybrid of the two languages, in this case Spanish and English, seems to be quite acceptable in certain communities.
"In Puerto Rico, we speak Spanglish. We invent words, we have that advantage that we can speak both Spanish and English," said vocalist, Elizabeth Fuentes.
Such an attitude may seem unique, and perhaps even blasphemous to the French, but for Puerto Ricans trying to reach out, particularly to second generation immigrant in the United States, it is a natural adaptation. A sort of survival of the fittest, it is a way to ensure exposure on the radio and further, it draws a connection with those who may no longer consider Spanish their mother tongue. The perception of corruption of a language is not on the mind of artists such as Fuentes, a fact that is not necessarily universally accepted. French teenagers may say cool instead of chouette, but they may also be reluctant to speak the language of that island across the channel and they may not be the only ones.
A recent surge of language protectionism has arisen in Germany where attempts at creating native equivalents for words that have previously been used in English are considered.
“We don’t want people to be language purists, but we want people to be aware of how they speak and that certain linguistic imports just don’t fit in German,” said Cornelius Sommer, former German ambassador.
Though it may be disappointing, or even sad, for a language lover to find that English words are becoming increasingly common, the reality is that it is not the first time in history that phrase hopping has occurred. At the turn of the previous century as the world’s elites were parlez-vousing en Français, French certainly made its way into much of everyday speech. To a lesser degree, there are also certain German, Dutch or Japanese words that a part of daily English, and vice versa. The phenomenon thus seems to be quite a natural one, particularly as the world becomes less closed off and people come into closer contact with one another. Language purity can even be deemed an archaic concept, one that has no place in a globalised world.