An Academic Matter

Recently l’Académie française, the nearly 400-year-old body of savants charged with perfecting and protecting the French language, was in the news for having admitted as one of its 40 “immortals” a francophilic Englishman. Never since it was founded by Cardinal Richelieu, in 1635, had such a thing happened.

The Englishman, Michael Edwards, poses no threat to the purity of the French language. He lives in Paris, teaches at the Collège de France, holds French citizenship as well as English, is married to a Frenchwoman—and is a published poet in French as well as English. He was quoted as saying:

“This is a moment of crisis for French and it makes sense, I believe, for the academy to choose someone who comes from, as it were, the opposite camp but has become a champion of the special importance and beauty of the French language.

“French philosophers and scientists are increasingly writing in English in order to be published worldwide. But if they write in English, they will cease to think in the characteristic way the French think. A whole treasure of the mind will be lost.”

It is clear that despite Edwards’s appointment, there is no worry that the Académie will suddenly begin to allow English imports like e-mail. (The Académie wants courriel.) The Académie will continue to fulfill the mission eloquently stated in Article XXIV of its charter:

La principale fonction de l’Académie sera de travailler, avec tout le soin et toute la diligence possibles, à donner des règles certaines à notre langue et à la rendre pure, éloquente et capable de traiter les arts et les sciences.

Like France, most major languages of the world have official bodies dedicated to preserving their purity. English is the glaring exception. Neither in England nor in America (nor Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc.) has there ever been an official body to regulate the language.

The reason is simple. We’re a millennium too late to protect our purity. The Norman French invasion of 1066 gave us three centuries of French vocabulary, so that the majority of our words even today are French. Look no further for evidence than the English version of the charge to the Académie: principal, function, academy diligence, possible, certain, language, render, pure, eloquent, capable, treat, arts, sciences all are borrowings from French. You really don’t need a translation.

And so for the English language, since we have no purity, we have no language police to protect it. Anarchy rules. We fight over our language in the streets, brick by brick—hopefully, ain’t, split infinitives, the Oxford comma.

It has been left to private enterprise to attempt the equivalent of the academies. The American Heritage Dictionary, published in 1969 as an antidote to the supposed permissiveness of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, introduced an American version of the Immortals with its usage panel of 100 supposedly expert users of the English language.

But even that dictionary was somehow hijacked by the descriptive linguists who compiled it. Rather than categorical yes or no, the dictionary reported percentages of approval or disapproval by the usage panel.

And that was half a century ago, when the notion that there should be one standard for American English seemed more important than it does in today’s era of diversity. Nowadays the notion of a usage panel (now up to 200) seems quaint, at least as far as controlling the language is concerned.

Still, I think it might be fun to have an official English Language Academy. Think of the pageantry if they adopted the official French costume, including a long coat of dark blue or black, embroidered in green and gold, and best of all, equipped with a sword. Think of the opportunity for academic politics it would provide in choosing members. Think of the fodder it would provide for editorials, columns, and blogs ever seeking raw material for the media’s insatiable appetite.

Yes, I will humbly accept the honor and the responsibility.