Ever-sensitive to non-French terms slipping into French, the government in Paris is banning e-mail. No, not banning electronic communication, banning the English word “e-mail.”
Goodbye “e-mail”, the French government says, and hello “courriel” — the term that linguistically sensitive France is now using to refer to electronic mail in official documents.
The Culture Ministry has announced a ban on the use of “e-mail” in all government ministries, documents, publications or Web sites, the latest step to stem an incursion of English words into the French lexicon.
The ministry’s General Commission on Terminology and Neology insists Internet surfers in France are broadly using the term “courrier electronique” (electronic mail) instead of e-mail — a claim some industry experts dispute. “Courriel” is a fusion of the two words.
“Evocative, with a very French sound, the word ‘courriel’ is broadly used in the press and competes advantageously with the borrowed ‘mail’ in English,” the commission has ruled.
An unscientific (but plausible) review of the words in Google on French domains would seem to differ.
I don’t suppose if it was mentioned that the word “mail” passed into English via French that it would make any difference.
Ah, well. C’est la vie.
Two thoughts further on this, and why it’s, in it’s own way, sillier than the “Freedom Fries” nonsense.
1. While the diktat from Paris is not mandatory on private citizenry, it does seem to be mandatory for the government. The “Freedom Fries” thing was all-voluntary and sporadic.
2. The French are fighting against the tide here. They are trying to mandate the form of language, whereas the Freedom Fries thing was as much popular uprising as anything else, and if anyone is still doing it, it’s a trivial number of places.
3. The French are doing it to “purify” the language, irked because of all those foreign (English) words. We did it in order to show we were torqued, and there was no other systematic reshuffling of the language.
And it’s probably silly even to talk about it.
Well indeed, I am french and can tell you I’ve been using “email / mail” since my day 1 on the web.
And for those wondering, the word “courriel” comes North America. Well Quebec – Canada to be precise. Here in France, we’ve had “mél” but it didn’t work out… We’ll see if the new word will go further thant the government offices this time round.