What a Spalage!

John Gallagher (seen previously in these parts, e.g. 2020, 2022) reviews Bernard Cerquiglini’s ‘La Langue anglaise n’existe pas’: C’est du français mal prononcé for the LRB (6 March 2025; archived), and he is as enjoyable as ever:

Picture the scene​: it’s a few years after the Norman Conquest, and a man goes out to shoot deer in the New Forest. He’s breaking the law, as the right to hunt here is reserved to the Crown. The man is caught, and arrested – not by his own countrymen, but by ‘a group of armed jabbering foreigners’. Our hapless English hunter is forced to take a crash course in a strange language. First, he learns the word ‘prisun’; soon after, he’ll hear the words ‘foreste’, ‘rent’, ‘justise’. Uneasy in an occupied land, he will find language turned against him, his homely Saxon terms elbowed out by the language (and brute power) of a new Norman elite.

The scene comes from The English Language, published in 1949 by Charles Leslie Wrenn, a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. Wrenn was one of many scholars for whom the history of English after the conquest was painful to relate. In 1855, the philologist and later archbishop of Dublin Richard Chenevix Trench frightened an audience of schoolboys with the story of the deliberate perversion of the language by the French: he accused them of drawing ‘a secret satisfaction, a conscious sense of superiority, in thus stripping the language of its grace and ornament, outraging its laws, compelling it to novel forms, showing, even while it is used, how little it is regarded, and making thus not merely the wills, but the very speech of the conquered, to confess its subjection’.

Hysterics like these are nothing new. By the latter half of the 16th century, when the number of words in English increased at an unprecedented rate, anxieties proliferated about the threat to the language’s good Saxon stock from foreign lexical invaders. Authors and translators borrowed promiscuously from French to expand English’s range of expression, prompting Samuel Johnson to warn that too much translation risked shaking the foundations of English. Since no book ‘was ever turned from one language into another, without imparting something of its native idiom’, translators’ ‘mischievous and comprehensive innovation’ in attempting to ape the style of originals – which, in the 18th century, were very often in French – meant that they wrote with an insidiously Gallic inflection. This, for Johnson, was worse than simply borrowing new terms, something which had exercised critics for years. He warned that ‘single words may enter by thousands, and the fabrick of the tongue continue the same, but new phraseology changes much at once; it alters not the single stones of the building, but the order of the columns.’ If nobody stopped the translators, the English would be left ‘to babble a dialect of France’.

Having a linguistic superpower on the doorstep helped to form a uniquely English set of linguistic neuroses, but over the last century the situation has reversed. English is a global lingua franca. […]

It’s no secret that modern English is saturated with French. Insults and derogatory terms owe much to the French example – bastard, brute, coward, rascal, idiot. French oozes from the language of food and drink: chowder echoes the old French chaudière, meaning a cooking pot, while crayfish started out as escrevise before the English chopped off its initial vowel (something they also did with scarf, stew, slice and a host of others) and decided that the last syllable sounding like ‘fish’ was just too good to pass up. From arson to evidence, jury to slander, French runs through the language of the English law (and the ‘Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!’ of the US Supreme Court), such that the philologist Mildred Pope could write that the only truly English legal institution, at least from a linguistic perspective, was the gallows. With contemporary English including more than eighty thousand terms of French origin, Georges Clemenceau might have had a point when he argued that ‘the English language doesn’t exist – it’s just badly pronounced French.’ In this engaging and sometimes infuriating essay, Bernard Cerquiglini – linguist, medievalist, member of Oulipo, advisor to successive French governments on linguistic affairs – pushes Clemenceau’s statement further, arguing that ‘the global success of English is a homage to Francophonie.’ Anyone speaking English today, Cerquiglini argues, is mostly speaking French.

For Cerquiglini, the roots of the fundamentally French nature of English lie not in the gleeful lexical burglary of 16th and 17th-century writers and printers, nor in the ‘gallomania’ which saw à-la-mode speakers of 18th-century English cramming their discourse with every scrap of French they could. The crucial era is the three and a half centuries following the Norman Conquest: an initial phase, from 1066 to 1260, where French was the language of a colonising elite, followed by the period until the end of the 14th century during which French embedded itself as one of the languages of England, shaping the language – its vocabulary, its syntax, its speakers’ identities – from within. This was a time when, in the words of Ardis Butterfield, French was ‘England’s other vernacular’. For Chaucer and his contemporaries, it was not a foreign language. Some researchers of the insular French spoken and written in England in the 13th and 14th centuries have argued that multilingualism was so ordinary in 14th-century England that not everyone would have had a reliable sense of the boundaries between the country’s different languages. They switched happily between English and French within the same document – sometimes even within the same sentence – in a way that suggests a lack of interest in where one language ended and the other began. And neither Anglo-French nor this multilingualism were literary affectations: it can be found being used alongside English and Latin in records of London guilds and trade, courtrooms and even the cries of 14th-century street sellers. Speaking French was a very English thing to do.

Even talking about ‘French’ in these centuries is complicated. National languages and standard languages, inasmuch as they exist today, were creations of a much later era, and regional variation within French was significant in the medieval period. Cerquiglini maps the way that English has preserved features of the French spoken in Normandy and Picardy, which came over with England’s conquerors. These regions were north of the Joret line, named after the 19th-century French linguist Charles Joret, and maintained a set of regional peculiarities that continue to echo in English today. Terms like ‘prey’ and ‘veil’ preserved ‘Normano-Picard’ vowel patterns rather than those of Paris, where proie and voile were the norm. Normans were known for substituting a ‘k’ sound for ‘ch’, so that they pronounced the word for horse as keval rather than cheval – something that survives in English words like carpenter (which would have been charpentier south of the Joret line but carpentier to a Norman) or castle, echoing the Norman castel rather than chastel, which would later become château. The Norman influence explains why the English say ‘garden’ with a hard rather than a soft ‘g’.

A second wave of borrowing after the post-conquest era drew more from Parisian French, and explains why English sometimes preserves two different French regional versions of the same word – like ‘guarantee’ and ‘warranty’. The patterns of change and preservation are predictable enough that Cerquiglini, as an Oulipian, is tempted to try a touch of counterfactual linguistic history, imagining what English might sound like if some other terms had been preserved at the right time. His linguistic what-if gives rise to the highly pleasing speculative sentence ‘What a spalage! The carventer is ratching the trokets!’ English’s preservation of the sounds of 11th and 12th-century Normandy gives the lie to Clemenceau’s statement – English might well be French, but hardly badly pronounced.

It’s not without pride that Cerquiglini calls modern English ‘a vast museum of the French language’. […] Cerquiglini picks up on ‘commuter terms’: words with their origins in French but which were taken up in England, either developing a new meaning or preserving an old one which continental French subsequently abandoned, before being reimported into France amid French’s great anglicisation. He splutters at being asked by a Parisian travel agent about his voucher, pronounced in the English manner. This is no English word, he tells her: it derives from old French, and anyway, couldn’t she have used bon d’échange, bon or coupon, three perfectly permissible French terms without a shady cross-Channel past?

Cerquiglini is predictably up in arms about the ‘manifest stupidity’ of reaching so often for anglicisms in French. He is irritated by the contemporary usage of a term like ‘spoiler’ in French (from the archaic French espoillier, itself building on the Latin spoliare), though notes with admiration that in Québec we find the alternative divulgâcher, a cheerful portmanteau of divulguer (to divulge) and gâcher (to ruin or spoil). But anglicisms like budget, fashion or rush, borrowed from French and nurtured in English before making the journey back to their motherland, might even be a source of some pride. They allow Cerquiglini to take a measure of solace, even if the old French solaz, meaning consolation, and the 17th-century soulas have long since disappeared from use, with their English cousin outliving them both. ‘The purists who denounce an Anglo-Saxon lexical invasion are mistaken,’ he writes. Modern French may be being anglicised, word by borrowed word, but this should be understood as ‘an internal mutation of the French language: the anglicisms are French neologisms.’ […]

The most compelling​ element of Cerquiglini’s argument comes in the form of a defence of the dynamism, creativity and impact of medieval Anglo-French. That such a defence is needed reflects the fact that he is writing, in the first instance, for a French audience. Francophone histories of French have traditionally had little interest in the odd ersatz version of the language spoken by the English and surviving into the present day in such legal terms as ‘grand jury’, ‘attorney’ and ‘mortgage’. Cerquiglini reflects on how the study of insular French was marginalised in France: ‘People understood that it interested the (British) specialists of Anglo-Norman, who were kindly invited to the Sorbonne to discuss their hobby, but the history of real French took place elsewhere.’ This mirrored the disdain with which the French of England was viewed by some medieval writers. A 12th-century biographer of Thomas à Becket, writing in Canterbury, assured his audience that ‘Mis languages est bons, car en France fui nez’ – my language is good, because I was born in France. Chaucer was in on the joke, describing the Prioress of the Canterbury Tales as speaking French ‘After the scole of Stratford atte Bowe,/For Frenssh of Parys was to hire unknowe’.

For Cerquiglini, Chaucer’s England was no linguistic rump, cut off from real French. His provocative argument is that medieval England functioned as a ‘neological laboratory’, a place that absorbed a great deal of Norman French after the conquest and then, separated politically from Normandy from 1204 onwards but still tightly linked to France and French, proceeded to spend the next two hundred years creating its own unique vernacular, and helping to generate the copious lexicon that English would inherit. The ‘colonial’ French of the Norman Conquest gave way to Anglo-French as ‘a tool of culture and work’. It tied England to the Continent. At the same time, England’s linguistic situation made it the place where the study of French as a foreign language first took root, with the emergence of such language-learning texts as the medieval manuscript manières de langage. ‘French literature and the study of the language,’ Cerquiglini argues, ‘were born on the other side of the Channel.’ English might be a French invention, but modern French was invented in England.

[…] It’s worth asking why these questions of language still have the capacity to ruffle feathers. Being precious about the subject invariably indicates, you might think, an inferiority complex. It’s easy for English to make grand claims about its historical openness to foreign inspiration because, when it comes to prestige and power, it’s left the others in the dust. By contrast, French’s glory has been and gone. […]

How do the languages of medieval England and France fit in to this? Even where Cerquiglini’s argument aims to puncture some commonplace French linguistic prejudices – his roundabout defence of anglicisms that turn out to have been French all along, his elegy for the strange and archaic French of 14th-century England and its contribution to Francophonie – the basic understanding is that there is something called ‘French’ and something called ‘English’ and that they have always existed in opposition to each other. The story of Anglo-French is the story of a time when the understandings of language and nation were wholly different to our own; contemporary categories collapse in the face of the linguistic dynamism and diversity of medieval Europe.

It might be seen as a failure of imagination to write a compelling defence of the hybrid language of a multilingual society in an era of vigorous mobility, contact and exchange without ever really challenging those national binaries. Histories of language as told today are still too often triumphalist or oppositional, and our global languages still speak loudly of their colonial pasts. In a speech in Ouagadougou in 2017, Macron announced his intention to ask the Académie to compile ‘a francophone dictionary which is richer and broader than one containing just French from France, and which reflects our Francophonie’. This isn’t a selfless endeavour. He reflected that French inhabits ‘a linguistic space of unequalled power across all continents and especially in Africa’. The old rivalry with English continues to shape French linguistic thinking, with Macron arguing to the Burkinabé audience that ‘to restrict oneself to a particular language, to reject the French language because English is more fashionable in Africa is to ignore the future! French will be the number one language in Africa and maybe even the world if we play our cards right in the coming decades, so let’s get going and take up the challenge together!’ The future of French may have very little to do with France.

I don’t approve of hassling travel agents about their choice of words, but I like the attack on linguistic prejudices and the defense of “the hybrid language of a multilingual society.” Also, divulgâcher is a wonderful word.