Abstract
The primary objective of this article is to observe the phenomenon of “anglicism” in the French language and to study the causes and the reasons for the frequent use of English borrowings. English, as an international language, influences French strongly despite the efforts of French purists to protect their language from it. This article describes and analyses the influence of the English language on the French language. It addresses the notion of franglais as a social phenomenon in French that can be observed at different levels of life. Borrowings from English, or anglicisms, represent one of the most important types of semantic neologisms in the French language. There are six types of anglicisms in French: semantic, lexical, syntactic, morphological, phonetic and graphical. The repeated use of borrowings in French results in the modification of their semantic structure according to the peculiarities and needs of the French language. Anglicisms in French acquire different shades of meaning. The most frequent English borrowings have the suffix –ing like shopping or camping. The English suffixes -are and -al have been transformed into the French suffixes -aire, -eur, -el, which are more typical for the French language. Many popular English words are used in the business sphere, not only in France but all over the world (brainstorming; mainstream; process; workshop; bullet points; burnout; conference call; desk; one-to-one). Language policy in France, with its main representative the Academie francaise, tries to control the redundant use of English words in this era of globalisation.
Highlights
Today it is impossible to imagine a French conversation without words like ―business‖, ―shopping‖ or ―Wi-Fi‖
English borrowings are called ―anglicisms‖, the word that is commonly used in mass media
The language policy of France, with its most active representative the Acad mie française, is determined to maintain the purity of the French language, especially where the borrowing isn‘t perceived to be a good fit
Summary
Today it is impossible to imagine a French conversation without words like ―business‖, ―shopping‖ or ―Wi-Fi‖. According to a study written by M diaprism and published in the well-known French newspaper Le Parisien, almost 90 per cent of French people use a lot of English words in their everyday life, that is to say, speak franglais every day (Delvaux, 2016) This term, ―franglais‖, which means the mixing of English and French, appeared in 1959, and is still used as the principal term that covers this linguistic and social phenomenon. The use of English borrowings in the French language was the key issue in the works of researchers such as Guilbert (1975), Pergnier (1988), Lenoble-Pinson (1991), Picone (1996), Bulley (2005), Stuart (2006), Bogaards (2008), Planchon (2017) and many others Most of their works focus on the sources of anglicisms, spheres of use and different grammatical, semantic and phonetic transformations.
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