French Language Police Ban Spamming

Charles Bremner reports on the latest effort by the French state to fight off the American-English invasion from le web, or rather ... la toile:

The Ministry of Culture's language agency, or police as we Anglo-Saxons usually call them, have issued a glossary of indigenous terms to replace the jargon that French IT people and civilian internautes are so quick to embrace. All employees of the state -- which means over a quarter of the work force -- are legally obliged to use these terms at work and in public communications rather than the English original.

You must say un fouineur (and presumably also une fouineuse) and not hacker. You are put on hold by un numéro d’assistance or d'urgence and not un hotline. "These new French terms are not yet widespread," says the DGLF, the language directorate. "The more people use them, the more easily they will enter usage and the quicker they will become familiar and seem always to have existed."

You can find the complete 330-page PDF glossary from the language agency here.

COMMENTS
Talk about fighting a losing battle (or swimming against the tide)—I don't know anyone who uses the 'official' terminology. Still, I suppose inventing French equivalents of Anglo-Saxon words keeps someone in a job somewhere. For "spamming", they've come up with arrosage, which translates as "watering" or "spraying".