PhD thesis - School of Informatics - University of Edinburgh

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Chapter 2. Background and Theory 25 ular areas of French society, and the Toubon law in 1994, an extension of the preceding law, aimed at limiting the influx of English throughout society and introducing French equivalents to replace new and existing anglicisms (Tattersall, 2003; Nicholls, 2003). This legislation led to a series of lawsuits against companies such as Quick in 1984 and Body Shop in 1995 for the usage of English menu items, brands and product names (Sokol, 2000; Tattersall, 2003). This resulted in hefty fines for the culprits and an or- der to translate their English menu items and product names into French. The extent to which these rigorous measures have limited borrowing from English is debatable. Tattersall (2003) suggests that the lack of available French equivalents to fast emerging anglicisms or the abundance of proposed French equivalents for the same En- glish concept (e.g. navigateur, explorateur, fureteur, lectoir, feuilleteur and broutage all referring to the English word browser) can contribute to the establishment of certain anglicisms in French. Tattersall also regards French as more rigid than English, and believes the concision and flexibility of English to be key factors in the attractive- ness of anglicisms. Currently, the primary source of anglicisms in French is American English. This is due to the super-power status of the USA in the world and is fuelled further by the omnipresence of the internet, a largely English language medium. 2.1.3.2 Frequency of English Inclusions Contemporary French writing and journalism are permeated with words and phrases derived from English. For example, Rollason (2005) cites a corpus analysis quoted in Laroch-Claire (2004) which found approximately one new anglicism in every three pages of Non merci, Oncle Sam! (Mamère and Warin, 1999), a book which is domi- nated by anti-American polemics of its two authors, Noël Mamère, a politician of the Green party, and Olivier Warin, a TV journalist. Several linguists have carried out com- parative studies between the number of anglicisms occurring in French and German. Zimmer (1997) found that, for a set of 100 computing terms, the native terminology of German only amounted to 57%, almost 30% lower than that of French (86%). Con- sequently, appropriate French translations for English terms were preferred. Plümer (2000) shows that there are 9% more anglicisms in German written and spoken media language than in French. Furthermore, Kupper (2003) determined that the proportion of anglicisms appearing in French newspaper advertisements tripled from 7% to 21% between 1976 and 2001. She found the same three-fold increase in the proportion of
Chapter 2. Background and Theory 26 anglicisms in German newspaper ads during that time period but starting at a higher level (15% to 44%). Two further studies compared the number of anglicisms in the Dictionary of European Anglicisms (Görlach, 2001) listed as being used in German, French, Italian or Spanish (Müller, 2003; Lohmann et al., 2004). Both found that most anglicisms are used in German and numbers for French, Italian and Spanish are lower but non-negligible. While this evidence suggests that anglicisms are less frequently used in French than in German, their increasing usage in French is indisputable. In fact, Humbley (2006) infers from his and previous analyses that various European languages are all affected by English with French being no exception. In the French newspaper text published in ZDNet France 7 on IT-related subjects, the evaluation data used to assess the English inclusion classifier for French, the percentage of anglicisms amounts to 6.1% and 6.8% of tokens in the development and test set, respectively (see Table 4.1 in Chapter 4). These percentages are very similar to those found in the Ger- man evaluation data from the internet domain which was also annotated as part of this thesis project (6.0% of tokens in the development set and 6.4% in the test set listed in Table 3.1). These findings provide some evidence that the language policy advocated by the French government failed, at least in some sectors of French society. Neverthe- less, it is difficult to arrive at clear conclusions regarding the intensity of the influence that English has on various languages in such cross-language comparisons. 2.1.3.3 Attitudes towards English Inclusions Compared to Germany, France’s government is playing a considerably more active role in protecting its language from foreign influences. However, it is unclear what the French people’s attitude is to anglicisms given that they need to obey laws that re- strict their usage of English terms and advocate the use of French translations instead. However, particularly French youngsters and people working in the media are rela- tively open to the use of anglicisms which can be attributed to the prestige of English in certain circles and the fact that French equivalents do not get introduced in time for tight deadlines in a dynamic and fast moving journalism environment. Therefore, a number of language purists, including several Francophone institutions, vehemently condemn the contamination of the French language with English forms (e.g. Laroch- 7 http://www.zdnet.fr/
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Appendix C TIGER Tags and Labels C.
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Bibliography 198 Andersen, G. (2005
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Bibliography 200 Bresnan, J. (2001)
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Bibliography 202 Damashek, M. (1995
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Bibliography 206 Hachey, B., Alex,
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Bibliography 208 Kirkness, A. (1984
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Bibliography 212 Poplack, S. (1988)
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Bibliography 214 Sokol, D. K. (2000
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Bibliography 216 Yang, W. (1990). A
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PhD thesis - School of Informatics - University of Edinburgh

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