From covidé (infected with coronavirus) to confinement (lockdown) and éco-anxiété (climate anxiety) to verdissement d’image (greenwashing), the pandemic and the climate crisis account for most new French words, Le Monde has concluded.
But if 28% of recent additions are essentially English, according to an analysis by the paper, nearly half are French coinages, demonstrating what it called the language’s “great suppleness, as well as the creativity and humour of its users”.
Le Monde studied the 514 words incorporated in the authoritative Le Robert and Larousse dictionaries over the past three years, finding the number of new medical terms had trebled to represent about 20% of all new entries.
“I had never seen one typology of words so overrepresented among our new lexical entries,” said Carine Girac-Marinier, the head of Larousse’s dictionary department. “Quite suddenly, a very specialist vocabulary was being adopted by everyone.”
As well as technical terms (asymptomatique, PCR), existing words were adapted – as in vaccinodrome, for vaccination centre, and confinement, with its logical corollary déconfinement, the end of lockdown. Whole new expressions, such as cas contact (when you’ve been in close contact with someone who is covidé) also emerged.
While social issues (including the inevitable wokisme) accounted for a slightly higher proportion of new words overall, the climate crisis and its impact on human activity provided the most neologisms and extensions of meaning, Le Monde found.
These ranged from plasticroûte (a blue crust of plastic formed on coastal rocks) to écoblanchiment (an alternative to verdissement for greenwashing), surcyclage (upcycling) and – much used in France in recent weeks – mégafeux.
Of words imported into French from foreign languages, English accounted for the vast majority – about 80%, Le Monde found. The French generally avoided English pandemic terms, preferring gestes barrières, for example, to social distancing.
But English borrowings were very common in the technical and social fields, said Géraldine Moinard, the publishing director of Le Robert. “English is everywhere,” she told Le Monde. “It’s unavoidable, a kind of model.”
Not all borrowings were the same, however, the paper noted. “Some are just lifted straight: coffee shop, fan art, mocktail, vibe,” it said. “Others, such as hipstérisation and instagrammeur/euse are English words that have been ‘francicised’.”
Yet others combine an English inspiration with a recognised French term: cododo, for example, uses the French dodo (“by-byes” or “beddy-bye”) to translate the English term co-sleeping, while sexto adapts texto (text message) to convey sexting.
“No one should be offended,” Girac-Marinier told the paper. “Lots of English originally came from medieval French. Exchanging words is all part of the dynamism of language.”
Other languages from which French has borrowed in recent years include Japanese, Korean (mainly for culinary terms), Danish and Swedish (for hygge and lagom respectively).
But French, the experts say, is more than holding its own.
Fully 43.6% of new definitions are French coinages or extensions, Le Monde calculated, including vingtenaire (someone in their 20s), consommacteur (conscious consumer) – and the perhaps not-very-French coolitude, defined as “a state of relaxation and calm, often conducive to tolerant behaviour”.
