Random: France Bans Gaming Terms Like 'eSports' To Maintain Language Purity

That sounds very... xenophobic...

All very catchy terms. The fact the French use the term weekend has always baffled me when they don't use the term week. This makes it even more baffling.

A very french thing to do

Seeing France has laws about how many non French language songs are played on their radio stations, this isn't surprising.

However I would imagine trying to police people's everyday vocabulary isn't that easy to do.

Ok, it's not Banning people using it, its just not using those terms on Official documents anymore.

@MrGawain Imagine if English tried to do that. It wouldn't be English anymore.

This spells bad news for a Latinx VTuber accessing the eShop.

@ModdedInkling
xenophobic:
"having or showing a dislike of or prejudice against people from other countries."
Yeah, thats a strong word to throw out there and I don't think its that, sounds like government just trying to control the proliferation of non french words into everyday language, which to be fair is a big ask, common language use is a vey organic thing...

@ModdedInkling Not the first time France has been accused of that tbh.

French Youtubers use english terms all the time with a strong french accent which make what they say very hard to understand even for bilinguals.

I find it funny all these people who are offended by this, while Youtube is full of messages from people who complain that some videos are commented in Spanish, French or portuguese.

Et je suis sûr que ce serait pareil ici. Si des francophones venaient commenter ici en français, il y aurait plein d'anglophones qui couineraient.

Since the 70s, we've been talking about " joueurs de jeux vidéo" (video game players), but now we have to say "gamers" to sound cool. If there is already a term that exists, why change to an English word that less than 10% of the population will understand?

This nonsense reminds me of an episode from the ill-fated 1994 RoboCop TV series where one of the presenters of the Media Break news programme announced that you could go to prison in France for speaking English.

Maintaining language purity is doubleplusgood.

As someone who thinks we should aim towards that everyone speaks the same language (since language-barriers are dumb and annyoning as hell) I don't approve this

Bon Apple Teet!

On one hand I salute the French for trying to keep their language alive and relevant.

On the other the added complication is just unnecessary

@HotGoomba that’s what the greatest Frenchman who ever lived (Eric Cantona) did.

Part of me finds this hilarious. I find it a strange thing to be concerned about, but then again, there are many things I am concerned about that others would find strange... can't really say much either way.

I remember the days when I worked at a retail store where a lot of tourists came.

One thing I learned was that french people refused to speak english, but of course they expected you to speak french.

Yeah no, and sure sometimes tourists from other countries had same issue, but that was a more uncommon thing.

With french people that was mandatory.

Also credit cards, because my country is stupid and most stores (including the one where I did work) don't accept those.

But that's a different issue for another day.

Anyhow this is the reason this totally does not surprise me at all what France is doing here.

A worthy cause, and those across the pond should do the same, throw out all the borrowed words from other languages. Speak Anglish or die.

That's so weird.

Thank goodness this doesn't extent to character names. Imagine being arrested for calling her Rosalina instead of Harmonie.

@WCB

*cause (from French)
*across (from French)
*pond (from Latin)
*language (from French)

how insecure

More of this please. English is already a disastrous & confusing compromise, no need for others to fall into the same mess.

I only imagine some french politician reading documents full of "All according to keikaku (Note: Keikaku means plan)", flipping the table and saying "if you need to translate then just use the f@#$ing native word instead".

Quite honestly, as long as this is just for government documents, it makes sense. Trying to control public language would be a disaster in the making though.

Other Countries do the same, only Germany is very much adopting english Words, especially to sound more "intelligent" by using english Terms as Buzzwords.

Imo, just translate the Words and search for own Stuff.

It makes the World more fun!

I didn't realise France also did this kind of thing, I thought this was more a Quebecois kind of rule

@Coalescence Getting the hang of using words like: wear, where ware, there, their, they're, then and than can wear, I mean where, nope sorry I mean ware a person out.

In other words, there are still government collars who, in their pursuit of generating an air of meaningful tax-funded activity, believe they can adjust the natural development of a language with mere bans. As a philologist, I have bad news...

Btw. as a Background.

France and also Spain have Institutions to maintaine the Language.

In spain it is the Real Academia Española
rae.es

Other Languages do the same.

Look how brutally messed up english is because it adopted french and latin Words wildly AND went through a Vowel (and other) Change.

It is important to maintaine your Language and Culture.

Curiously, they translated "game as a service" as "jeu vidéo à la demande" (videogame on demand). That's not remotely the same.

I've long hated the term eSports and assumed that early versions of it were playing Madden or something similar. Why isn't competitive chess "board sports"? And their participants are unfacetiously called athletes.

We all know how successful banning words in a language tends to be. This may work at the government level, but in common usage? I doubt it.

I think that’s great. I like diversity instead of just homogenized global corporate pop culture.

@Ryan_Again From the French perspective this is homogenization.

I don’t really see anything wrong with this. If they have words in French to describe things why not use those words? Words have meaning and power.

Americans complain all the time about people that use hybrid versions of english such as spanglish, japanglish and the list goes on because there is a break down of understanding and unlike America, France has a national language so it makes sense that they try to enforce that. You can’t police language in general but it makes sense to have a standard otherwise you will have whole swaths of citizens moored by time and their educational upbringing. In general, I detest slang for the same reason (granted, I am guilty of using some slang from my formative years, I try not to).

America allows for anything goes (but doesn’t teach that in schools) so depending on where you live you may have to break out a dictionary or google translate because you didn’t happen to grow up in a certain culture in addition to being American. Or worse find your ability to describe yourself and your experiences have been colonized by people that at best are dissimilar or at worse are oppressors (key example is “woke” which is mostly used differently by non Blacks from the way it’s intended to be used by African Americans and that word has lost much of its power to describe a specific circumstance) Let alone the dialect differences in American English by region. It’s both frustrating and fascinating to me.

@Tyranexx That's the point, this is about official government documents. Which is acceptable.

French government and authorities are quite weird and draconian.

@sanderev Right, I never said it wasn't acceptable. I wished to point out that, historically, banning something, at least in common usage, can have the opposite intended effect.

J'AGREE I LOVE FRENCH... RECENTLY FRANCE HAS BECAME MORE OF THE QUÉBEC STYLE, PRESERVING OLD CALQUES AND SUCH

@ihaveawindows je peux te dire que la France est plus hypocrite qu'ici au Québec. Ils font des trucs comme ça mais leur version de l'émission "La Voix" s'appelle "The Voice" 🤣 they're preserving the purity only where they like it lol

@HotGoomba I'm pretty disappointed in you. I've seen some of your more clever comments. This is just... hmm, what's the word...

@ModdedInkling What do you think - is it xenophobic to say that the first thing to do when visiting a country is that one should leave, as HotGoomba is doing here?

Yeah, i'm sure the French terms which are much longer than the English ones the entire rest of the planet uses will catch on so well!

Doesn't anybody in French government have anything better to do than invent French words for terms which are hardly ever used in any government writings, anyway?

As someone who thinks we should aim towards that everyone speaks the same language

@mariomaster96 And how do you plan to achieve that?

@Tyranexx True, but they're not banning it. They are regulating what the government says. Something like this would, however, never work in my language (Dutch), since we have a lot of borrowed words from English, French and German.

@CANOEberry I don't think it's achiveable but it would be cool if it were that way. It's a shame when people can't properly communicate because they don't speak the same language

@Gunit1099 wkwkwkwkwkwk so true...

la france voulait que l'anglais fait la plus langue là...

(my french sucks, i know. i'm using it right off the bat lol)

@Fizza as stated by @shinesprites , no, no one is going to arrest people for "parler des calques"

I'm french (not native but it's a story for another day) and I made an account here just for this article haha...

So yeah, France takes words from english, so do other countries with french and other languages. For example and to take @Enigk case, we don't have a word for "weekend" which would be "fin de semaine" ("end of the week" by litteral translation). For this particular case I guess the english word was adopted out of habit because it's more convenient and cooler, but I'm not a specialist on these questions so I can't confirm the origin of usage.

The difference between "weekend" and things like "cloud gaming", "streamer" or "game as service"... You guess it, they are more recent words and probably not understandable for people who don't play video games (or rarely) and don't have this "gaming knowledge".

And as french citizen, nobody is forced to used the french translations of "cloud gaming" etc. See these as recommandations for french professionals whatever. I doubt the hole french population is even aware of this measure, our eldery in the countryside must not even know the English terms haha.

@PrinsPaddestoel "on demand" tends to have rental implications in usage (over here at least--see cable companies' "on demand" services for this in action,) so i think it works for stuff like cloud/subscription games which GaaS often are

So it's just a style guide issue.

@sanderev Reading back, I can see how my previous comments are a bit misleading (I blame posting first thing in the morning lol). I fully realize this ban is at the French government's document/official communication level and doesn't extend to the general populace; I was pointing out it would be pointless if they did so.

This wouldn't work in English (and German, from my limited knowledge of it) either. We've borrowed so many words from other languages that the list would be quite exhaustive. XD

@CANOEberry I'm sorry, Discord and Reddit ruined my humor.

Worse part is, by now I thought of a much better joke, but I feel like it's too late to say it.

Screw it I'll make it anyways.

I believe the biggest reason this is done is for consistency over time! Keep in mind that slang terms go in and out of style in the blink of an eye, historically — the government isn't policing anyone's use of language, it's just setting a precedent for itself so that in a hundred years, official documents make sense and aren't filled with nearly-forgotten slang terms. It maintains a consistency and authenticity to the language over time so that it can avoid some of English's common pain points. Many languages I know of have programs or at least pushes for this kind of thing!

It's kind of a tough concept to consider for English speakers because that language is an unrestrained (and lovable) mess of influences, but it makes sense for languages with lower speaking populous and more control to do things like this regularly!

One must also consider the cultural aspect, everyone speaking the same language sounds nice in theory but so much of human culture is centered in language. It's sad to hear about dead languages, some forgotten to time entirely, so preserving them is neat as long as they're properly allowed to grow within limits!

Everything who thinks we should ban the non-word "eSports" raise your hand.

Interesting to me that no one on this British website has yet chimed in to mention that the English language itself wouldn't exist without (Norman) French. Maybe all the people here taking cheap shots and loading the comment section down with ignorant tripe could do some reading about William the Conqueror, 'cause you guys and girls aren't speaking Anglo-Saxon, Latin or anything Celtic right now.

Negative comments from users in countries like Ireland or the Netherlands are particularly noteworthy, given that quite a few people in those countries are making serious efforts to preserve local languages, often spoken by a relatively small number of people (less than 1 million). I am all in favour of people preserving and extending their languages, so I'm not sure what's up with that.

And just in case anyone reading this doesn't like what I'm saying and wants to reach for that Report button, here's a suggestion:

The proud bashing avant-garde in here should organiser a rendez-vous to build up your dossier of insults, a veritable salade of bon mots. After all, you wouldn't want to put up a weak façade that exposes you to ridicule. That goes double for the blondes and brunettes, the risqué types, the connoisseurs of linguistic technique...

@HotGoomba Reading Twitter only made my humor more dry, cynical, and tongue-in-cheek. And I never even set up an account.

So nice to see you struggling to make any sense of this (french) news haha...

I'm very disappointed in France for doing this. In fact, I feel like protesting them for doing something so sinister. I'll never eat French Fries ever again.

Wait, what do you mean fries are German?

English and Japanese in particular often take in words or terms from other languages for new concepts. Its a bit...crappy to try to maintain some kind of language purity like this.

English itself is a horrid mishmash of a dozen different languages, including French. Language needs to grow and evolve, thats how they work

If only they were "promoting French and Indiginous-French language inclusivity" rather than "language purity," the western internet commentary would surely be doubleplusfavorable.

I get it. Language can be a barrier if terminology is in a foreign language.

At first this sounded very China...but, the more I think about it the more I like it. More countries should be doing this sort of thing. The uniqueness of each culture is what makes the world actually interesting. We've been loosing that rapidly under the giant global morass of internet-ization as a culture. I'd much rather live in a world where France is France, Italy is Italy, and Canada is Michigan-North than on big global Reddit-IRL.

@Bunkerneath I thought that too. Clickbait headlines, huh.
@Slapsillium Actually, the first definition of xenophobic is “prejudiced” so it sort of fits well.

If "Tuna Roll" was in japanese, I wouldn't know what fish was in the sushi.

I seem to remember this as a regular thing for the French there’s lots of computer terminology that has its own unique French word vs being a French sounding variant of the word most other languages use.

Vincent: You know what they call eSports in France?
Jules: They don't call it eSports?
Vincent: No man they got a language purity system. They wouldn't know what the "barrier to understanding" eSports is.
Jules: Then what do they call it?
Vincent: They call it 'jeu video de competition'
Jules: 'Jeu video de competition'. What do they call the eShop?
Vincent: Well the eShop's the eShop, but they call it le eShop.
Jules: Le eShop. Ha ha ha ha. What do they call an eGirl?
Vincent: 😳

Every single word any of us speaks is a borrowed/stolen/butchered word from a different language. I'm all for preserving linguistic diversity, but there's a difference between a language at risk of extinction and the natural evolution that every language undergoes. For example, let's take the phrase quoted above, "'jeu video en nuage". Are any of the words in that phrase currently at risk of being forgotten? French is one of the most spoken (and most learned) languages in the world, and those words will be well known to many millions for many more years to come. What these rules are about is exclusivity, not preservation. And I oppose exclusivity precisely because of the importance of linguistic diversity. Some scientists, I believe, have theorized that using words from different languages actually allow you to *conceive of things you'd be unable to with just one language, so borrowed words actually serve to expand one's capacity for expression and nuance.

Now yes, the government is welcome to have standards in its own official material, and I'm not suggesting that this is some violation of civil liberties. But official actions such as these set a tone and are meant to bleed down into mass discourse, so it's totally fair to criticize them.

Well, I think it's a good thing for France, more of that, please. You don't want your language to end up like Danish, where every second word is the F-word and the rest is just a mix of Danish and English... many times even grammatically incorrect.

@Park_Triolo Exactly, it's very weird how many people are willing to erase their culture for consumerism.

French Gamers:
Quoi? C'est scandaleux. C'est injuste!

Honestly I'm surprised Japan doesn't do stuff like this with the Japanese language. Instead, it's kind of the opposite... steal words from other languages (okay, 99.99993% English) and then act like they were always Japanese words to begin with.

@Not_Soos Please don't use that term

...what? “Keeping the purity of the French language”
That sounds like they’re trying to be snobs!

That's...weird...
I'm all for keeping languages alive and as pure as possible, but esports doesn't really strike me as significantly culturally significant that they can't run under a unified name internationally...

It's a new and modern thing that originated with a new and modern term. There's really nothing worng with keeping it international.

They also call football "football" and not "Le pied balle", so i really don't see the issue.

@TechaNinja Yeah don't worry, I hate the term too, lol. I was making fun of how grammatically incorrect the term was, but I think the joke was lost.

As I recall, this effort to safeguard the sanctity of the French language is nothing new. Back in the '80s my 8th grade French teacher told us of the government's efforts there to preserve their language against the English/American influences so pervasive in pop culture and economics, to resist the "bastardization" of le francais.

Americans at least couldn't give 2 rats' posteriors about what foreign words we absorb into our melange of a language. We're practical people, if nothing else.
But the French have a proud, distinct and beautiful language to uphold, in a world awash in English. Maybe they can't be as laissez-faire as us in the cultural majority.

@CANOEberry
I'm admiring your elite comments on a topic I was sure would catch your attention. I think even your removed follow-up to that dreadful "Michigan North" comparison was warranted.

@Abeedo
I figured. Being in Canada didn't really help my perspective when half of the French here is anglosized.

Aside from a few exceptions (such as basque) there is no such thing as a "pure" language. The french should be more concerned about preserving their culture.

@Bunkerneath Holy hell, thank you for highlighting that part. It's like everyone just read the headline and started yelling in the comments. Oh, and yes, the headline was definitely rage-bait.

@Kevember The thing about language is that language and culture are very intertwined. That's why trying to learn a language without learning about the culture (or cultures) tied to it is far more difficult than trying to absorb the whole package.

This from the language that doesn't have a word for 80

Ironic coming from the country who has the most Anglicisms of all French speaking countries.

This is literally the most French thing in the world.

It’s absolutely insane and beautiful.

@Mando44646

I know what you mean. In anime at least once every few sentences there’s an English series of words to explain a concept that I guess is difficult to express in Japanese.

Kind of like in Gundam Unicorn when Full Frontal is explaining what the NT-D does. Most of explanation is in Japanese and then he suddenly says “NT-D, Newtype Destroyer System” in English.

Gaming has never been a sport lol

@PrinsPaddestoel sorry

They already have done worse, when they forces us to write cédérom instead of CD-ROM.
A fat bunch of prehistoric morons

A completely unnecessary change especially when the "legal" made terms aren't any different from the "illegal" ones.

I love France's relationship with the English language.

When I lived there for a while, there was a local radio station whose trail involved the phrase 'f***ing good music!' (obviously not censored as they said it). Middle of the day, public radio. Great laugh.

@Teksetter I appreciate your perspective, not to mention your patience and tolerance! I think I'm used to NEStalgia's acerbic/sarcastic comments by now, haha, but the comment irked me because I've actually enjoyed previous visits to Michigan. There's a fair amount of beauty there, and some towns (Ann Arbor and Bay City come to mind) are a world away from the "urban wasteland" image. I've seen a bit of the USA, and I take zero pleasure in seeing or pointing out some of the scary things that are happening. I haven't crossed the border much for years and years now, and it's a loss. But if someone wants to make a display of ignorance like "hurr hurr, Michigan North", I won't be the one to tell them about the surfing in Tofino.

The actual surprise for me here was that this move (more like diktat, let's borrow from German) came from the government, and not the Académie Française. The latter folk have already given their word on this stuff, but the "feds" over there decided to go further with it, for whatever reason. It's not the outrage that so many in the comments here blindly assume, but I'm not going to explain France to people here, haha. I just wish more people understood that inter-cultural comfort and multi-lingual skill are the way to go in this world, or that I could reassure the anxious that cultures survive through openness and not defensiveness... but anyways...

@ModdedInkling it's not so much xenophobic as much as it is requiring members of government to speak their official language in order to be, y'know, understood by the majority of their population. what's xenophobic is Quebec banning any signs in the province from having the writing in the language of the business owner above or bigger than the french. not to say france isn't xenophobic, but this specific decision isn't

@HammerGalladeBro no ones gonna be arrested, this only applies to government documents

@jello64 you had the right wear the first time... ware is something you sell...

I'm french and I find it ridiculous.
This kind of rules are decided by old grumpy people who never played a videogame in their life.

Anyway, I can assure you 99% of gamers will keep using the english terms. The french version of them just sound stupid for the majority.

@Brometheus See what I mean.