Treacherous anglicisms

In an "increasingly interconnected" world everybody understands the worth of good translators. They are more than a living bridge between languages, they are the invisible wordsmiths hidden in lonely booths at the far end of conference halls and the meaningful voices in the shadow of otherwise mutually incomprehensible conversations.

Thus, when a translator sets off alarm bells on the changes affecting the languages they work with, the rest of us should listen. Which is why an article penned by Myriam de Beaulieu an interpreter with the United Nations should be shared and publicized.

Beaulieu complains about the semantic, syntactical and cultural consequences provoked by the increase of anglicisms in French and explains how these words often weaken French semantics and impoverish lexicon. Beaulieu has also produced a glossary listing in alphabetical order the English words that tend to drive francophone speakers into a process of pauperization of their linguistic and cultural heritage.

Beaulieu writes that given the apparent similarity between words in English and French it is increasingly common, especially in our speed driven Internet era in which most of the English lexicon comes from the Web, to introduce English words such as for example development, management, leadership, etc. directly into French without wasting time (so to speak) on finding the appropriate corresponding words. This dynamics produces what Beaulieu calls «a loss of precision in French and the anglicisms reduce the chances the speaker has of getting complex messages through».

At times things get even worse and lead to what could amount to cultural nonsense. A striking example is the word "liberal", a politically loaded anglicism which in all romance languages should be translated with the wording "centre-left", as in French and most romance languages the word "liberal" is associated with right-wing political tendencies.

Needless to say what is true of anglicisms for French is also true at least for all romance languages.

As the first "Internet generation", meaning youngsters who have practically learned to read on the Web before ever opening a book come of age the risks of losing the specificities rooted in the history of the various languages and their speakers increases exponentially. As Beaulieu rightly underscores «if before the Internet a given language was the mirror of the collective experience of its speakers, today, (by way of the Internet) language mirrors the global history of Internet users».

The upshot is the risk of losing the diversity of outlook carried by the different languages of the world by way of a reduction of lexical and semantic diversity caused by the flood of anglicisms. This process could take most non native speakers of the English to speak a set of imprecise and impoverished languages, the semantic shadows and lexical skeletons of their previous linguistic avatars.

In other words and brutally put we are witnessing the coming of "fast language", which could do to language use what "fast food" did to eating habits over the world...

Getting back to Myriam de Beaulieu's article, it provides yet another angle to view what I think is increasingly clear: that "globalization" is an incomplete word because the phenomenon it describes is not culturally neutral but it comes wrapped up in the English language and those traits of the Anglo-Saxon culture the language coveys. Thus it is maybe time to refer to the word describing the nature of our times as "anglobalization", not only for the sake of calling a spade a spade, but also as a warning that cultural colonization is indeed a clear and present danger.


Robert Scarcia
Journalist