dépaysement
de-pei-z-MAN
The unsettled feeling of not being in your own country
dépaysement
Literally un-countrying.
It covers the good version, the thrill of being foreign, and the bad one, the quiet wrongness of everything being slightly off.
The archive
French
Spelled for a pronunciation it abandoned
The language that gave English a third of its vocabulary and kept a spelling system for sounds it no longer makes.
FamilyProto-Indo-European › Italic › Latin › Romance › Western Romance › French
ScriptLatin
Speakers310M 74M native · 236M second
Weeks to a working level30 Thirty weeks rather than twenty-four, alongside Spanish. Counted from English. It is the Foreign Service Institute's figure for someone starting from English and from nothing.
The first hundred words cover57.7% and the first thousand 80.8%
- Final consonants are usually silent, except when the next word starts with a vowel and they come back to life. That is liaison, and it is not optional.
- Eighty is quatre-vingts, four twenties, and ninety-seven is sixty-seventeen. Belgium and Switzerland fixed this and France did not.
- The Académie française has been ruling on correct usage since 1635 and has no legal power whatsoever.
- It was the language of diplomacy for roughly two centuries, which is why so many treaty terms are French.
- There are more French speakers in Africa than in France, and the centre of gravity keeps moving south.
- An English speaker starts with an enormous free vocabulary from 1066 onwards. The counts quoted run into the thousands, and the meanings have drifted just enough to make faux amis a permanent hazard.
- The hard part is the nose. French has nasal vowels that English has nothing like, and they carry meaning: get the nose wrong and you have said a different word.
- It is official in 29 countries and a working language of the UN, the EU and the International Olympic Committee, which is far more institutional weight than its speaker count would predict.
- The Power Language Index, an academic ranking built on twenty indicators, has put French in the top three or four languages in the world, on breadth rather than size.
- French keeps two options for the incomprehensible, c'est du chinois and c'est de l'hébreu, and one older and stranger: c'est du javanais.
Spoken on five continents, the second most studied language on Earth, and the reason half of English exists. You already know thousands of its words; it wants them back. Cinema, gastronomy, philosophy, and an Africa where it is the lingua franca of twenty booming capitals: the ROI compounds for life.
Words with no translation
flâner
fla-NE
To wander a city with no destination, watching it happen
flâner
Paris invented an entire literary type from this verb, the flaneur.
The point is that the walking has no destination and no guilt attached.
retrouvailles
re-troo-VAI
The joy of meeting again after a long time apart
The word only exists in the plural, which is honest, since it takes two people to have one.
l'esprit de l'escalier
les-PREE de les-ka-lye
The perfect reply that arrives only once you have left
Literally staircase wit: the answer you think of on the way down the stairs, after the argument is over.
Everyone has this.
Only French gave it an address.
râler
ra-LE
To grumble as a way of life, not as a complaint
râler
Not a rant.
A low, continuous grumble that is almost social.
To tell someone they are ralant is closer to teasing than to criticism.
frisson
free-SON
The shiver that arrives when something is beautiful, not cold.
The French shiver of aesthetic pleasure: goosebumps at a chord change, a chill down the spine at a line of verse. Science calls it aesthetic chills; French got there first and shorter.
tutoyer
tu-twa-YAY
To cross into the informal you, and into the closeness that comes with it
A verb for a social act English has to describe in a sentence, and usually gets wrong.
Someone has to offer it. Taking it without being offered is a small trespass, and everyone in the room hears it.
terroir
teh-RWAR
The taste a particular place leaves in whatever grows there
Soil, slope, weather, and the habits of the people who have worked it, all tasted at once.
Every wine language on earth borrows this word untranslated, which is the proof.
Next to its neighbours
Where French parts company with the languages closest to it, and what each one would cost you from here.
French vs Spanish → French vs Portuguese → French vs Portuguese (Brazil) →
Where to practise it
Reading about a language is not speaking it. These are the places I would go to find someone to speak French with.
The French Passepartout is not out yet
Five printed pages that carry you through the arrival. Leave your address and you hear about it first, and nothing else.
Leaving takes one click.
Stories in French
Short stories written inside a measured vocabulary, with the word lists and nothing invented for a textbook.