For nearly 400 years, an exclusive society of academics has convened to determine the official rules of the French language. This week, they delivered their latest proclamation.
What happened: The French Academy presented the final volume of its updated official French language dictionary to President Emmanuel Macron. The lengthy result has raised the question: what’s the point of an official dictionary anymore when language moves so fast?
- This final section covers entries from R to Z, completing a process that began in 1986 and finalizing the first new edition since 1935, but many “new” words are already old.
- Because development takes so long (with each letter taking over a year of debate), current everyday words like smartphone, émoji, and tiktokeur have been left out.
Why it matters: Dictionaries help us better understand and engage with the languages we speak. But with new slang appearing seemingly every day, a definitive compendium of every single word might be passé.
In Canada: Québec, which has its own French, also has its own official online dictionary, the Grand dictionnaire terminologique du Québec. As for English, there is an authoritative Canadian English dictionary from Oxford, though it hasn’t been updated in print since 2004.—QH