French spelling as seen by the French

How the French regard their spelling

Even the most ‘enlightened’ people in France (such as professionals, teachers, the middle and upper classes) talk about French spelling in terms which reflect a strange mixture of curiosity and fear, confidence and ignorance. Historically, we can summarise attitudes towards orthography under three headings:

1. – a long period of subservience to the written word, the power of which continues to this day;

2. – from the sixteenth century on, periodic attempts to take up the cause of the spoken language against the written, generally led by grammarians and linguists, with their claims couched in exaggerated language which still colours today's debate.

3. – more recently, on the part of a minority, a more conciliatory approach which tries to take account of the needs of both the written and the spoken language, and of social realities, and attempts to reconcile the arguments presented by both sides.

Subservience to the written word

Since the Middle Ages, generations of schoolchildren in France have been imbued with the idea that their national language was something noble, or almost sacred. It was impressed upon them that French had to retain its link with Latin, the ‘father’ of languages and of the humanities, and fount of religion and knowledge.