Most political leaders struggle to speak fluently in a foreign tongue. Only the exceptional manage to mangle their own. Among them: France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy. Last year, in a written parliamentary question, François Loncle, an opposition deputy, said the president “mistreated” the French language with his endless grammatical slips and “vulgar expressions”. He urged the government to “take all necessary steps” to put an end to the president’s “attacks on the culture of our country and its reputation in the world”.
Now the education minister, Luc Chatel, has finally replied. In a letter leaked to the French press, though oddly not published in parliamentary records, Chatel denies that the president abused the French tongue. Rather, he argues, Sarkozy uses a “clear and real” form of language, which reflects his “proximity” and “spontaneity” with the people. Chatel adds that the president specifically avoids “amphigoric style and syntactic convolution”.
In France, however, a nation defined in part by its language, the purists are aghast. The Académie Française was set up in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu to codify and regulate the French tongue. In the year to April 2010 the language police of the Professional Advertising Regulatory Authority checked 36,000 ads for proper use of French and ordered 919 corrections.
President Sarkozy is not the only French politician to wrestle with the language. Some fail to make adjectives agree with nouns, or conjugate verbs improperly. Others simply slip up. The interior minister Brice Hortefeux recently referred to “génitales” (genital) rather than “digitales” (digital) finger-prints. And in a discussion about the economy, former justice minister Rachida Dati coolly said “fellation” (fellatio) instead of “inflation”.
(Excerpted and adapted from The Economist)