From “aide-mémoire” to “c'est la vie” English abounds with lexical borrowings from French. However, over the years anglicisms and Americanisms have become part of French vocabulary with the term Franglais being used to talk about lexical borrowing from French in English and from English in French(Thody,1995,p.1). This essay will examine the latter, looking at what types of English loanwords have been integrated into French lexicon and analysing how they have been “frenchified” and the use of Franglais in the different areas of French society.
To begin with, after researching this topic it is clear that French has incorporated English lexical borrowings into many different aspects of its grammar from adjectives to nouns and verbs. Nevertheless,…show more content… As for loanwords which have been altered semantically, their forms have stayed the same but they have taken on new meanings which are different from their use in English:
2. English. people < Franglais. les people/ un/une people (English Translation celebrities/a celebrity)
(Partos,2015)
In this example, French has taken the English plural noun “people” assigning it a gender, adopting it as a singular and plural noun and employing it in a context which would be unfamiliar to English speakers.
In terms of syntactical changes, the word order of some English lexical items has been reversed during the French borrowing process:
3. English. Service station < French/Franglais la station-service
(Partos,2015)
In addition to the alterations mentioned above, French speakers have also borrowed English nouns, fusing them together to form a compound noun which does not exist in English:
4. English. a tennis player. Franglais un tennisman (French un/une joueur/euse de…show more content… English. show business< Franglais le show-business
(Thody,1995,p.226)
The addition of the hyphen, a common feature of French compound nouns, could represent an effort to differentiate this loanword from its English equivalent and to make it as French as possible by following French grammar and orthographical rules.
In conclusion, this essay has shown how many English lexical items have been borrowed in French and incorporated into different domains of French society, often undergoing morphological, orthographical, semantic or syntactical changes so that they conform to French rules.
However, despite this myriad of loanwords, French speakers still use their own structures not borrowing those of English and therefore this borrowing could be regarded as an example of casual contact on the borrowing scale (Thomas and Kaufman 1988 pp. 74-76 cited Winford, 2003, p.30). Finally, the reactions to Franglais are also varied with the Académie française seeking to protect the French language whereas the French culture minister stated recently that France should embrace these loanwords as they enrich its language (Wilsher,