When in French (19 page)

At Columbia in the early twentieth century, the anthropologist Franz Boas revived the Romantic interest in the diversity of languages, laying the foundations for linguistic relativism's modern form. (It was Boas, in fact, who first mentioned Eskimos and snow.) His protégé Edward Sapir went on to become a seminal figure in the foundation of the field of linguistics, producing studies of such languages as Nootka, Sarcee, and Chinook. “The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group,” he wrote. “No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality.”

Sapir trained Benjamin Lee Whorf, as strange and poignant a figure as American intellectual life has ever produced. Whorf was born in 1897 in Winthrop, Massachusetts. After an undistinguished undergraduate career in the chemical engineering department at MIT, he became a fire prevention inspector with the Hartford Fire Insurance Company, specializing in the
underwriting of buildings with automatic sprinklers. Whorf was a Methodist, of English stock. During a crisis of faith, he became interested in Jewish mysticism, particularly as manifested by the Hebrew alphabet, which occultists had for centuries picked apart and spun around and recombined, believing it to hold the secret to man's original tongue. In 1926 Whorf added Aztec to his self-imposed, self-taught curriculum. In 1928 he took up Mayan. His quest to unearth the lost meanings of letters, to rediscover a linguistic city of gold, obsessed him to the point that his friends complained that he passed them by in the street, offering no sign of recognition. Appearing at the Twenty-Third International Congress of Americanists, seemingly out of nowhere, he dazzled the establishment with a translation of an Aztec manuscript long held to be impenetrable. On its strength, he received a grant to pursue his research in Mexico. The fire insurance company, the
Hartford
Courant
noted, agreed to grant him a leave of absence.

Passing his days at smelting plants and tanneries, Whorf worked his way into New England's elite intellectual circles, enrolling in Sapir's graduate seminar in American Indian linguistics at Yale. (His younger brother, Richard, moved to California and eventually directed
The Beverly Hillbillies
.) In 1940 he announced an attention-getting discovery: the Hopi language, he said, had no linear sense of time. He based this claim on several peculiarities of Hopi grammar, including the fact that its verbs did not indicate past, present, and future tense, per se. Rather, they marked validity, so that “He ran” would be rendered in Hopi as either “Wari” (running, a statement of fact) or “Era wari” (running, a statement of fact from memory). Presenting his findings as “the linguistic relativity principle,” Whorf heralded a “new physics,” in which speakers of different languages were compelled by their grammars to
different experiences of externally identical phenomena. “We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages,” he wrote.

Whorf died of cancer the next year, at the age of forty-four. In the decades to follow, some of his ideas were proven to be incorrect or overstated—among them the Hopi concept of time—but even the most prescient were vulnerable to distortion. In the 1950s the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,” stripped of its original subtleties, became shorthand for a sort of brute conflation of speech and thought. A shelter under which various canards about language congregated, it was marked for demolition by the 1960s, when Noam Chomsky and his theory of universal grammar came along.

Language, according to Chomsky, is a biological instinct. We are each equipped with a grammatical toolkit; all we have to do to start building is to be born a human being. In Chomsky's view, speech is as independent of culture as breathing or walking. The differences among languages are so trivial that each one of the seven thousand tongues spoken on earth would register as a mere dialect to a visitor from Mars. Rendered in a mathematical logic that cared little for igloos or clocks, Chomsky's ideas were revolutionary, and then they were consensual. By 1994, when the Harvard psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker published
The Language Instinct
, an “obituary” for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the concept of linguistic relativity had taken on an air of disrepute and even infamy.

People know how to speak like spiders know how to spin webs, Pinker argued, drawing much of his evidence from studies of the extraordinary abilities of children to acquire language without formal instruction. “The idea that thought is the same thing as language,” he asserted, “is an example of
what can be called a conventional absurdity: a statement that goes against all common sense but that everyone believes because they dimly recall having heard it somewhere and because it is so pregnant with implications.” The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, even if he had rather distorted it, was to Pinker a crock, a folk belief of the same dim hordes who took it as fact that lemmings commit mass suicide and the
Boy Scout Manual
is the world's best-selling book. Benjamin Lee Whorf, one scholar wrote, had undergone a demotion from unlikely hero to one of “the prime whipping boys of introductory texts on linguistics.”

 • • • 

T
HE ACADÉMIE FRANÇAISE
s'en branle
about Noam Chomsky. (In French you don't say “could give a rat's ass,” you say “jerk yourself off.”) Founded in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu to “clean the language of all the filth it has contracted,” the academy is the high authority on questions of what is or is not French. Richelieu modeled the institution on private clubs of language lovers that gathered at the Hôtel de Rambouillet. Today, its forty members are novelists, poets, philosophers, journalists, historians, doctors, attorneys, biologists, clergymen, and politicians. They are elected for life. In order to gain admittance, they must apply to fill a specific seat, whose previous holder they eulogize in a public speech.

Voltaire, Victor Hugo, and Louis Pasteur were academicians, as have been five heads of state, including Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the president of the French Republic from 1974 to 1981, who currently occupies seat 16. Baudelaire, however, was excluded on moral grounds; Moliere was snubbed for being an actor; Zola applied twenty-four times and was rejected on each.
“Willy-nilly, in the twenty-first century as in the eighteenth, anyone who wants to shake off the leaden cloak of conformism and mass communication, anyone who discovers that he wants before dying to participate in a civilized conversation, the image on this earth of
nostra conversatio quae
est in coelis
, does so in French,” the academician Marc Fumaroli has written (at least according to his translator, whose decision to use “willy-nilly” rather than “whether one likes it or not” provokes curiosity). The academy's motto:
à l'immortalité
. The notion that language is universal is about as plausible in its cosmology as a Champagne from Belize.

Technically, the academy's job is to produce a dictionary. Historically, it has not shone at this task, publishing nine editions over the course of four centuries. Its true role is custodial rather than creative. It acts as an overprotective guardian to the French language, fretting over who she's gone out with, when she's coming home, how she'll navigate a crude world without compromising her dignity. The academy can be reactionary: in 1997 it rejected the adoption of feminine versions of professional titles, arguing that
la ministre
and
la juge
belonged properly not to female ministers and judges but to the wives of their male colleagues. Even though the grammatical principles behind the position were sound—all French nouns are either masculine or feminine, denotations that have nothing to do with their referents' genitalia—the academy's stand confirmed its reputation as a bastion of crusty hauteur. The goal, it was clear, was to preserve the purity of the language—less a French well punished than one hardly touched.

The chief debaucher of French, of course is English, a loudmouthed vulgarian who made his fortune selling cola and
computers. French and English have coexisted and crossbred for as long as they've been spoken. But after World War II—as French lost its sinecure as the language of diplomacy and was forced to concede to English in the realms of film and aviation—English morphed from acquaintance to antagonist. “As befits a hard-working people, the French have no word for ‘week end,'” the
International Herald Tribune
reported in 1959. (An editorial writer, perpetuating the they-don't-have-a-word-for fallacy today, could just as easily claim that the French are so lazy that, to them, there's no difference between a weekend and a workday.) The paper continued, “So they have taken it over bodily from English, pronouncing it in English and enjoying it just as much as anyone else. Similar examples come to mind readily—‘bifteck' for beefsteak, for instance, and ‘gongstair' for gangster. But the English flavoring of French has begun to get out of hand, apparently, and in some Parisian circles is even becoming quite chic, or, as we say here, chick.”

Five years later the critic René Étiemble published
Parlez-vous franglais?
, a polemic against the English language and Anglo-Saxon culture, “that air-conditioned nightmare.” It aimed to combat the vogue for English through ridicule: the entire first chapter was written in a hideous pastiche of “
cette variété
new look
du babélien
.” The book helped to galvanize the feeling that language was a zero-sum game, that gains by English were a loss for French. Even as linguists thrilled to the ingenuity with which French speakers assimilated English—and, in the postcolonial era, languages such as Arabic and Wolof—and made it their own, eminences fretted that the dilution of the language would lead irretrievably to the deterioration of the culture, to which it was so dearly linked.

The central control of a pure French by Parisian authorities is a myth: Kinshasa is the world's second-largest French-speaking city. But it is a powerful one in France, with its tendency to privilege consistency over innovation. At the time of the French Revolution, only half of France's population spoke French fluently. Of the other half, 25 percent—speakers of regional languages such as Provençal and Breton—had no French whatsoever. (Even by the beginning of World War II, one out of two French people still claimed a regional language as their mother tongue.) In the nineteenth century, the government established universal education. It went on a standardization spree, purging the language of variations in grammar and spelling. Publishers joined in, issuing scrubbed versions of the French classics. “This linguistic revisionism fed (and still feeds) a quasi-religious belief among francophones that the French language had been
fixé
(set) since the time of Louis XIV,” Julie Barlow and Jean-Benoît Nadeau write. Charles de Gaulle was drawing on this heritage when, in 1966, citing “the bastardization of French vocabulary,” he created the Haut Comité Pour la Défense et l'Expansion de la Langue Française. The Bas-Lauriol law of 1975 restricted the use of foreign words in business and advertising. By the time a more muscular version of it was enacted in 1994, famously dictating that 40 percent of the music played on the radio be sung in French, the battle against English represented a major front in France's culture wars, reliably bolstering political careers and launching best sellers.

Something about French is embarrassing to English speakers. Its sounds are too sensually mouth-contorting, its constructions too pompously fervid, with all those loopy clauses and long words. If we approach the language with a sense of
abashment—P. G. Wodehouse immortalized “the shifty hangdog look of an Englishman about to speak French”—French speakers treat English with the sort of high-flown outrage that we most love to mock. The protests are both so indignant and so quixotic. It's hard to suppress a smirk upon reading the demand of a group of striking Air France pilots: “Stopper toute propagation abusive de l'anglais.” (
Stopper
not exactly being a canonical French verb.) Then there are the petitioning employees of the Carrefour supermarket of Nîmes-Sud, fuming, “Why this orgy of English words? Would we be under an Anglo-American protectorate?” all because they have to sell products called Bootstore, Top Bike, and Tex Fashion Express. Does anyone really think that French teenagers, per the academy's diktat, are going to trade out
sexting
for sending
textos pornographiques
?

It's easy to caricature the French as language hypochondriacs, but they are closer to hemophiliacs—a population that is especially sensitive to a genuine threat. French sees itself as not only an alternative to English but the most viable conduit of a competing value system. Calling on his compatriots in 2013 to boycott businesses that advertised in English, the philosopher Michel Serres argued that the increasing ubiquity of English was a cause of inequality: “Now the dominant class speaks English and French has become the language of the poor.”

The complaint is not just a French one. “English is not a language. It is a class,” Aatish Taseer recalls a Hindi-speaking friend—an aspiring Bollywood actor, refused work for his lack of English—telling him, in an essay called “How English Ruined Indian Literature.” The argument is powerful. It applies easily to the rest of the world, with globalization creating a caste of linguistic have-nots. Boutros Boutros-Ghali,
the former United Nations secretary general, has said that “much in the way democracy within a state is based on pluralism, democracy between states must be based on pluralingualism.” Linguistic diversity, then, is a check on political monoculture. It is as unhealthy for the global community to rely too heavily on one language as it is to mass-cultivate a single crop.

In
The Search for a Perfect Language
, Umberto Eco makes a moving account of man's efforts, over the course of two millennia, to “heal the wound of Babel.” They have been legion, running from the brilliant to the crackpot: Dante's illustrious vernacular, the
ars magna
of the Majorcan martyr Raymond Llull, the steganographers' codes, the Rosicrucians' “magick writing,” Volapük, Interlingua. The quest to rediscover or to create a universal language has most often been a utopian project, but it is not without darker possibilities. In 1966 Leslie Stevens shot
Incubus
, a black-and-white Esperanto horror movie. Starring William Shatner—he would soon confront the Klingon language as Captain Kirk—as a soldier seduced by a succubus, the film premiered at the San Francisco Film Festival, where a group of Esperanto speakers showed up at the screening. “Anytime they thought things were not pronounced correctly,” one of the producers recalled, “they screamed and laughed and carried on like
maniacs
and no one else could understand
why
.” As Orwell knew, cooperation is not possible without communication, but neither is totalitarianism. One wonders what form global terrorism would take without global English as its vector.