Unlike English, French is a centralized language. And unlike English again, its aficionados [es] usually have autistic reactions when it comes to integrating words from other languages. The result is a much poorer language, torn between common, natural use, and artifical-constructivist esperanto-like madness imposed by officials, academics and pressure groups. Who's to blame? By increasing order of guilt, j'accuse [fr]...
The Immortals
The French Academy (l’Académie française [fr]) was founded by the Cardinal Richelieu (the bad guy from the Three Musketeers), and they're called the Immortals (like the bad guys from 300). The members have been chosen by cooptation [fr] ever since. Legally, the institution is a Foundation with particular rules, but it doesn't seem to be getting much financing from the French government, and they have no actual legal power
Somehow, though, their job seems to require the purchase of ugly green jackets and extremely over-priced fancy swords. Yes.
Thus, they're pretty harmless old French people. Sometimes they're right, sometimes not. Their main concern, though, appears to be a genuine care for the purity of the language. As a rule of thumb, I'd say: trust their judgment whenever it's about old rules, and ignore it whenever they've had too much pastis [fr] and try to build up new ones.
Of course, they do hate any sort of competition from other languages, especially within France, their fief [fr]:
Despite furious opposition from L'Académie, Article 75 of the revised constitution now states that all the languages "are part of France's heritage". As a result, French tax payers also face a multi-million Euro bill to make everything from road signs to menus into "regionally acceptable" dual-translation form.
– France's L'Académie Française upset by rule to recognise regional tongues
Considering the equivalently babelist [en] (definition upcoming in a future post ici-même [fr]) proposal of subsidizing half-dead dialects by tax-money perfusion [fr], I daresay that we have no dog in this fight [en].
The International Organisation of La Francophonie [en] (sic)
With an 80 million euro budget financed by governments, their aim seems to be the promotion of some vague idea of French speakers helping other French speakers, and associating only with other French speakers. A sort of préférence nationale [fr] applied, ad absurdum [la], abroad? I don't get it.
Their armed branch [en] (or branche armée [fr]) is probably the Club Med. Indeed, it seems the very embodiment of the Francophonie [fr] spirit: that when you travel to a "foreign" [en] (i.e. [la]: non-France) country, your first priority should be to find your fellow Frenchmen, and avoid, at all costs, any sort of association with the local, indigenous [en] population. I've personnally been the unwilling witness of French tourists addressing everyone in French in the middle of Spain, and wondering what paella [es] is and whether it's edible. Your best course of action [en] is to answer in Spanish, whether you speak French or not.
Of course, said behavior raises the obvious question: why then leave the sacred motherland to begin with [en]? Indeed, a person moving (even temporarily) from France to a non-France country would appear as silly as the proverbial Polish emigrant who left a country packed with [en] ponies for a non-pony [en] country.
As I was saying: I don't get it.
The French government
And académiciens are not alone in their attempts to halt the sabotage of the French language: other authorities, with considerably more legal power, are hard at work too. The French government has introduced various pieces of legislation over the past forty years, the most far-reaching being the 1994 Toubon Law which ruled that the French language must be used – although not necessarily exclusively – in a range of everyday contexts. Two years later, the French ministry of culture and communication established the Commission générale de terminologie et de néologie, whose members, supervised by representatives from the Académie, are tasked with creating hundreds of new French words every year (such as resserrement de credit* and poule finale*) to combat the insidious and irresistible onslaught of Anglo-Saxon terminology. French speakers point out that in practice, most of these creations are not well-known and, if they ever leap off the administrative pages of the Journal officiel, rarely survive in the wild. There are, however, a few notable exceptions, such as logiciel and – to an extent – courriel, which have caught on: the English takeover is not quite yet a fait accompli.
– Can the Académie française stop the rise of Anglicisms in French?
This is already more about jacobinisme [fr] (the central power of Paris over France, crushing local dialects and cultures), than about mere linguistic concerns. And of course, it's about an autistic xenophobic inferiority complex of being scared of "foreign" words, substituting new word-concepts from English by new word-concepts made up.
Mais pour éviter que, dans certains domaines, les professionnels ne soient obligés de recourir massivement à l’utilisation de termes étrangers, l’adaptation du vocabulaire doit être encouragée, facilitée et coordonnée. C’est pourquoi, depuis plus de trente ans, les pouvoirs publics incitent à la création, à la diffusion et à l’emploi de termes français nouveaux. Œuvrer à l’élaboration d’une terminologie de référence, conforme aux règles de formation des mots de notre langue, et la mettre à la disposition des professionnels et du public, telles sont les missions du dispositif d’enrichissement de la langue française mis en place par le décret du 3 juillet 1996.
Let me translate that for you: In order to avoid that people who know what they're talking about use relevant and precise words, spontaneously adopted by them and then the general population, we shall use your tax money in order to foster bunches of bureaucrats. Those bureaucrats will create artificial words that, supposedly, "sound" more French. The new words will usually mostly sound uglier rather then "Frenchier", but we don't care about that. The only objective difference that makes them more French is that only the French will use them. Assuming they do. That is, assuming we somehow coerce them into it or pressure them or subsidize it. That is all.
As a French emigrant (or shall I say émigré [fr]) friend wrote:
Mon ami Gavin m'a appris que l'académie française — ou tout autre dépotoir de Picrocholes rances — avait décrété, loi Toubon à l'appui, que dorénavant il ne faudrait plus dire
blog, maisbloc-noteou simplementbloc. Ma réponse est: FUCK YOU WITH A RUSTY CHAINSAW, YOU STERILE SENILE TWITS! — et comme ce n'est pas du français, vous n'avez aucune autorité à faire valoir. Toutefois, puisque vous êtes trop microcéphales pour le comprendre si ce n'est pas en français, je vous le redis ainsi: ALLEZ VOUS FAIRE ENCULER, PUTAINS DE PUCERONS FASCISTES DÉCRÉPIS! Les pires sont bien sûr les fientes de pou qui des deux côtés de l'Atlantique font appliquer les diktats nauséabonds des prétendusdéfanceurs la Lang-fransèze. Contre les commissaires politiques et autres morts-vivants, je recommande la tronçonneuse et le fusil à double canon. Y en a pas beaucoup qui sont capables de me faire jurer sur mon blog. Ils en sont.– Faré, "Mots de quatre lettres"
Even if you don't read French, don't worry: the essential of his message is in uppercase English.
The Quebec government
Now those are really the guys with issues.
Those are the guys who actually do speak perfect English, yet will go to extreme lengths in order to keep speaking their Museum version of French (which sounds completely gay to the rest of la francophonie [fr]), interspersed with made up words that sound even worse. Those are the guys that could enjoy Men In Black [en] with the original actor's voices and full comprehension, yet will prefer to translate it as Hommes en noir [fr][sic] and watch it in some crap dubbing.
Oh and yes, almost forgot: those are also the guys who pretend to defend the French, while at the same time lacking understanding of its grammatical gender rules, even at the risk of doubting the very recommandations of the Immortals:
It was the Québécois who pioneered the feminization of job titles (with “new” versions such as professeure and ingénieure) in the 1970s.
– Can the Académie française stop the rise of Anglicisms in French?
If you ever move to Canada, I'd say avoid Quebec. Especially if you do speak French.