We have all heard the terms Franglais and Frenglish. Before this article, I thought they mean the same thing. In actuality they are different and today they are calling these clashes more of a clash of languages because inside that language they hold different descriptions for plants, animals and food.
The general break down of Frenglish is French words being used in the English language. The material regarding the Indo-European branches and their break downs helped me to understand some of the connections that this language talked about. One of those was that while English is Germanic, it resembles French so much because of all of the original French words that we use. Some of those words include par excellence and déjà vu. Another category would be those words that sound French, but Americans think they are English because of how prevalently we have used them. They include boutique, detour and entrepreneur.
Frenglish on the other hand is the usage of English words in French. It also includes AngloSaxon roots that were turned into nouns. These roots often added –ing. So, in French un parking would be a parking lot and un camping would be a campground. They took this form of making the roots into nouns a little further and made words in French that do not really align with our words in English. It would be like un relooking meaning a makeover and a lifting meaning a face-lift. One point to mention is that regardless if there is a direct translation or not people that speak a different first language may have trouble understanding the meaning of the word. One example would be the misalignment of word order in something as simple as walkie-talking being switched around. English is so widely used that many times its words are adopted by the French people before they can make a real decision on whether to use the English word or make a French word for it.
Another area that uses both French and English is Canada. Franglais is used in most parts of Canada. It is made up of equal parts of both English and French words. More than likely, it will be pronounced like its French, but used English words. You should not be surprised to find Franglais and Frenglish in literature. It is used in Shakespeare as a humor scene. Surprisingly enough the English word foot sounds vulgar in French, so he decided against the normal English word.
Regardless of which form we use, there can be misusage in both. Originally I thought of Franglais from my high school French class. There would be times that we knew some French words, but couldn’t complete the sentence, so we would add in English words as well. Our teacher could understand what we were trying to say, but clearly it was not the right way to say it. The cultures of both languages are intermixing so often that it is hard to keep one out of the other.
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