Why not even French people speak French.

You may be surprised to hear that not every French person speaks all the French he/she is supposed to. This makes learning French difficult. You need to know at least three levels of French before, with some ease, you can engage in French in a pub. Let me explain.

I have been trying my French since primary school and failed to be able to order a meal when I was 18. When I stayed for half a year in Paris, however, I discovered one should think of French on 5 different levels. Words and expressions from lower levels may penetrate higher levels but it is a slow process. Eventually, they wind up in the Larousse dictionary.

The language spoken on the streets and in the brasseries (pubs) changes about every 10 years. For instance, the notorious verlan of the nineties has become outdated as the kids started to apply verlan to verlan, inversing the inverse: un arabe --> un beur --> un rebeu. Just like the old London Cockney rhyming slang, you have to be told, otherwise, you can't figure it out.

The continuous changes in French, most of which the people in Paris seemed to be unaware of, made it difficult to keep up. So, one starts with the easiest level, which is what you learn at school. Grammatically correct French, with the best words, pronounced in a way that everybody can understand. This is the highest possible level. It is the language of the élites, of the Académie Française, of politicians on television, and so on. You can read it in Le Monde. (Photo: Charles and Comtesse de Poperinge, Maison Fournaise, Chatou, a must-visit for lovers of Impressionism.)

Below that, we find the language of Le Figaro which is just a tad more familiar and where the pronunciation starts to become a bit sloppy and people start to use more elesions (omitting sounds). With these two levels or layers, you can do business, make new friends, do anything you like and get around in France without any problems.

After having mastered these two layers, you can now descend into the third layer of French, the third or middle level, which is how French people actually speak to one another. (I think the YouTube vlog "Comme une Française" does a very good job at teaching that. But there must be more.) This level is not needed for business nor necessary for getting on with French people as they will understand the higher levels of French. The problem is that you cannot learn it from videos or books, at least not fluently - you need a lot of practice. You really need to be there. When you are young, a piece of good advice is to live in France for a year and have a relationship with a French boy or girl for as the French saying goes: "une langue s'apprend mieux sur l'oreiller" (a language is best learned on a pillow).

However, below the everyday common language level, there is the language of school kids, which used to be found partially in Le Canard Enchainé and sometimes in French movies. You don't need to learn that unless you want to mingle with teens and tweens. This fourth layer may come across as a completely new language and can be confusing. This level was often incomprehensible even to my French girlfriend in Paris who was "une sudiste" (born and raised in the South, she hailed from Pau). She insisted that her son and daughter (pictured here all dressed up) spoke "'normal French" at the kitchen table. "Je veux comprendre mes propres enfants dans ma propre maison, tu piges?" (I want to understand my own children (when) in my own house, you get that?)

Below all those layers of French, the fifth and lowest layer is comprised of old argot, new argot, Arabian influences, and various specific subculture vernaculars that come and go. Let's say this fifth level is a bin full of messed-up or coded languages that can be called French but actually are like the fallen leaves that come and go, i.e. "qui se ramassent à la pelle" (swept together and scooped up). No need to learn that.

By the way, this is nothing new. Louis XIV wanted one language in his country for administrative purposes and he wanted the language reform to result in a language that had regularity, harmony, and nobility. It had to be a language of philosophers and scientists, which, at the time, were almost identical professions. This uniformed, simplified French became the lingua franca in Europe and the Middle East for 250 years.

Requiring a uniform pronunciation, the reformers erroneously thought that the language of the area around The Louvre would be the language of Louis XIV, the Sun King, as that was his first home. The result was that Louis XIV had to learn to speak "proper French" himself! At his court, he had been rewarding creative and crazy versions of French but all of a sudden all that had to stop and everybody had to learn, well, proper French. One of the more curious newfangled ideas was that words could be classified as decent or indecent. Instead of "a steak of cow" (vache), you now had to say "a steak of beef" (boeuf).

Louis XIV of course had thought that the way he spoke would be the norm. But just like Queen Elizabeth II did not speak "the Queen's English" herself, so did Louis XIV not speak French in the way he wanted all of France to speak due to a mistaken idea of the literati of his time. I consider that one of the funniest things that happened to what we today call French.

drs Charles van der Hoog

Amsterdam Oud-Zuid, January 3, 2023