Originally published at: French gamers told to use French words, not English ones | Boing Boing
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France’s culture ministry has to say this. Fortunately, French gamers can tell them to stuff it up their tight arses.
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Is this just nationalism wearing a different hat?
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It’s just nationalism, period. Not quite as bad as what’s going on in Quebec, though, which is currently in the process of once again destroying its economy in the name of ethno-nationalist linguistic purity. France has nothing on Quebec when it comes to self-destructive and ridiculous nationalist insecurity.
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No one entity can control a language. They can try, but language has a life of its own.
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That’s a bizarre one, to the say the least. I think people in Montreal especially will end up ignoring this day to day because how can you function otherwise? It’s always been a very bilingual city and this law is so ridiculous that it’s a struggle to describe it any language.
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Why do they expect longer phrases to even have a chance of catching on? Why not try to replace eSports with something of a similar structure, but French? (i.e. jeu-v, although putting it in that order would result in miscommunication in English speaking areas)
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That understanding was one of the things that made the Oxford English Dictionary such a revolutionary undertaking in its time.
There was once a movement within English society to create a formal board of academics who would govern the proper use of the English language, as the French had already done at the time.
The OED took a different approach, crowdsourcing the enormous effort to document how the English language was used in practice without any pretense or judgment about how the language should be used.
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Merde, quels connards.
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“Streamer” or “joueur-animateur en direct”… hmm, such a difficult choice. If the French culture ministry could coin a new, short “French” term for it, they might have a chance, but this isn’t going to fly otherwise.
They kind of can, though, to a surprising degree. They can dictate what “proper” French is, which then gets taught by schools, used by journalists and writers, and gets accepted by employers, etc. France, not so long ago, had a bunch of mutually-incomprehensible dialects that were trimmed away in favor of standardized French due to central authorities like the culture ministry.
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Watch out, les joueurs vidéo, you might get la vache.
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That’s the problem, they pick these unwieldy phrases instead of something actually usable, like “ordinateur” for “computer.” I don’t want to be a “joueur-animateur en direct” any more than I’d want to be a “live video shower of gameplay,” but I’d be happy to be “un fleuveur” or “un couranteur.” Pick usable words and people will be happy to use them.
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Bringing up fears of loss of the French language in Quebec is a sure winner for populist politicians who want to stir up their base voters, who largely come from rural communities and almost never encounter an anglophone.
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It is also politically targeted nationalism. Loanwords from other languages (for example karaoké from Japanese) are tolerated. Only English words seem to get targeted for replacement.
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I am a Quebec resident and I endorse this post.
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Excusez-moi, s’il vous plaît, I think you mean “complètement inutile”.
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I’ve heard the original Parti Quebecois described as a bunch of urban, cosmopolitan, atheist socialists and Marxists who achieved power by pandering to the anxieties of a bunch of unsophisticated rural Catholic conservative bigots.
From what I understand, the reason France isn’t able to take bigoted national chauvinism quite as far as Quebec does is because the revolution there destroyed the power of the RCC, whereas in Quebec the church was able to continue to promote anti-Semitism and bigotry for approx. 175 years after 1789. With Le Pen and her ilk, however, we’re seeing an attempt to revive that kind of hate and racism in the mother country.
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In 2016, PQ didn’t want to associate with Le Pen
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/marine-le-pen-front-national-quebec-1.3497468
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