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Comment by lugus35 | Hacker News Reader

French is one of those dying tongues. In France we don't speak french anymore, we speak franglais, a mix of french and english words.

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And in England we speak a mix of English and French words. Have done since around 1066.

It's a problem of speed of changes, old people can't have a true discussion to young people anymore.

I've noticed that whenever I've been to France. I learned French in school, and I notice there's an age cut-off when I can no longer understand what people are saying.

A small consolation is that the people who no longer speak intelligible French are usually somewhat better at English.

This is nothing unique to French, it is just the generational evolution of language. Listen to a news report in any language from the 1920s. It is vastly different in tone, style, vocabulary and possibly accent than a news report today. Change is the only constant.

French is actually doing very well. First, using a lot of English words doesn't mean we can't speak real French anymore (we use a lot of English words in my group of friends when we speak, but our written conversations are much purer). Secondly France is not the only place where French is spoken (common misconception in France), and among these other locations a lot of African countries speak a very good French, if not better than ours.

French is currently unique in that it's the previous lingua franca, so much so that the term for "world language" in English is a French term.

That French is now using loan words from English doesn't mean that it's dying. Have you tried to speak English without French / Latin / Norse loan words? Good luck.

It just means that French is like any other language now, aggressively borrowing from the current world language. Nothing wrong with that.

not quite. The term "lingua Franca" originally referred to a Mediterranean trading language - certainly a Romance language but not French. Yes for a while French was a lingua Franca in the modern sense but the term doesn't come from French.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca

Quebec is trying to save French through some crazy laws:

- You can't have a company whose name isn't French.

- The company I work for had to replace all keyboards by French keyboards, had to switch to an HR software available in French, had to switch all OSes to French, had to put French stickers on the microwave oven, etc.

- I can't send my kid to an English school if I haven't been to one myself.

"Big Mac is Big Mac, but they call it Le Big Mac" (C)

- You can't have a company whose name isn't French. That's much more nuanced than that. See article: http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/quebec-cracks-down-...

It's about having the language of the work environment in French. If the company decided to switch the keyboard to French and change your microwave in French, that is just a company policy, not a government regulation. The point of having the HR software in French is to allow someone that only speak French to work in HR in the company. Surely you can still use the software in English if you want to, but at least it's available in French.

No, the French police forced us to made these changes.

On the other hand, at this point, anyone under 30 in Quebec is fluent in English, because they had to be to pass school. I've only had trouble making myself intelligible to people 40-60+, and even then, that tends to be when I am way, way north-east towards Baie Comeau.

I think it's a question of usage.

I went for a hike off the beaten track in Quebec City and asked for directions and a 22yo 'kid' confessed to me he hadn't spoken English since he left school.

Further north, everyone in Riviere du loup understood my butchery of their language and replied in English - except at the farmers' market, where local producers don't get many Anglo customers (except the winemaker who offered tours of her vineyard)

And half of this English words are used completely differently than in English or even don't exist in English (parking, shampooing used as names for example)

French is absolutely not endangered at all, there is no risk for the language dying in the next 50 years with that much speakers. The number of speakers is actually growing (along with the other top 15 languages).

The languages we are speaking about might only have a handful of people from the older generation speaking it. The French legacy dialects actually are on the other hand endangered.

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