Why I Chose to Study French

I have spent the majority of my life living in Southern California, where the two primary spoken languages are English and Spanish. It is ironic, then, that I chose to study French. This was primarily due to the fact that, as a freshman in high school, I wanted to speak a language that was uncommon in order to stand out, and French was the first thing that came to my mind. However, I quickly found myself legitimately interested in the language and culture of not just France, but that of the myriad of different countries that the French have colonized and spread their language to.

The dialect of French taught at my high school was primarily Parisian French, with minimal exposure to Quebecian French and dialects in North Africa. My interest in the language was in large part due to the way it was taught at my high school. The teachers were fairly strict in their implementation of a no English rule.

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This was helpful because it forced us to shift from a way of thinking that was simply translating from one language to another, to actually thinking in French in order to form coherent sentences. I also enjoyed that they allowed us to make mistakes in things like pronunciation without shaming our mistakes with immediate corrections. Instead, they would gradually allow us to shift and pick up on their subtle corrections, which allowed us to gain confidence in speaking and writing in French. The more advanced classes also didn’t rely on imparting rules of grammar and conjugations, but more on giving us difficult reading and writing tasks.

Despite my best efforts, there are still faults in my capacity to speak and read French. These become clear when there are certain things that I can easily express in English, but struggle to express in French. The best example of this would be my difficulty in speaking colloquially, such as using certain, simple phrases such as, “Aw, man” or, “That sucks,” both of which are perfectly natural for me in English. In contrast, when I want to express similar sentiments in French, I find that I have to filter what I want to say through a mental checklist to test whether a phrase is grammatical or not. For example, I could say “C’est horrible,” to say essentially the same thing as the two English phrases, but it lacks the effortlessness and colloquialism that I easily achieve with English. The result is that I feel like I am overlaying French rules over my naturally acquired English ones, so, at times, the result feels forced or too structured. This inability to speak colloquially comes from the fact that I was taught primarily by listening to or reading news programs and scientific sources.

The most glaring examples of differences between French and English emerge in the formality of certain French words. The formality of French comes from the different pronouns, conjugations, and sentence structures it uses depending on the person you might be talking to. For example, an informal “you” would be “tu” while a formal version of the same word would be “Vous.” Similarly, to informally ask someone how they are doing, you would say “ça va?” while the formal version would be “Comment allez-vous?” From a Whorfian standpoint, the argument could be made that the formality of French makes its speakers more aware of who they are talking to. Moreover, it makes them more conscious of manners and formality than non-French speakers or speakers of languages like English that lack a formal register. This reasonably could be supported by the fact that by many standards, French culture takes manners and formality more seriously than American culture does. However, one could just as easily argue that the formality of the French language is a reflection of their culture, and not the other way around as in the Whorfian viewpoint.

While studying French in high school, I noticed many similarities between the two languages that seemed complicated and difficult to fully appreciate until I took Ling 1 this year. Among these differences I noticed is that both English and French have the same word order of Subject, Verb, Object. This similarity becomes clear in simple sentences such as “il mange les raisins” “he eats grapes.” In both the English and French sentences, the order goes subject, he and il, verb, mange and eats, and finally object, grapes and les raisins. Some variation arises when adverbs or adjectives are added to sentences, such as in “il trop mange” “he too much eats,” which, of course, means “he eats too much.” However, despite the variation in adverb and adjective placement, the overall order of the sentences consistently remains subject-verb-object. This is likely because both English and French are head-initial languages, which is to say that the head of the sentence precedes its complements, unlike in a language such as Japanese, which is head-final. The resulting conclusion, then, is that these similarities are most likely the result of similar head-initial parameters in both French and English.

Another similarity that came to my attention while studying French is the similar structures with which questions can be asked. In both French and English, questions such as “qui crois-tu que Jake payerai?” or “who do you think that Jake will pay?” are grammatical, however, questions such as “qui crois-tu que mangera le poisson?” or “who do you think that will eat the fish?” don’t work. This is because in the first two correct sentences, the question of “who” is in the object position of the sentence. Thus, in the sentence “tu crois que Jake payerai qui?” “You think that Jake will pay who?” the object “qui” or “who” can be moved to the front of the sentence without making the sentence ungrammatical. However, in a sentence such as “qui crois-tu que mangera le poisson?” “who do you think that will eat the fish?” it becomes clear that the presence of a wh- question in the subject position of a clause makes a sentence ungrammatical. It is unlikely that this a part of universal grammar given that in languages such as Spanish, a wh- question can originate in the subject position of a clause. It is most likely, then, that this similarity is due to the same null subject parameter in both languages. This conclusion is further supported by the fact that both French and English have poor person morphology, don’t allow the subject to come after the verb, and don’t allow null subjects. According to the null subject parameter, if one of these elements is present, the others must also be, and as seen here, that is the case in both English and French.

One of the major differences between French and English that I struggled with at first is the negation in French. While in standard American English, “not” is used to denote negation, in French it is “ne...pas.” For example, in English, one would say “I have not gone to the supermarket,” in which it becomes obvious that the negation only appears once in the sentence before the auxiliary verb. However, in French, one would say, “Je ne suis pas allé au supermarché” in which it is clear that the negation is a negative concord that comes immediately before and after the auxiliary verb. This was further complicated for me given that this negative concord is not always obligatory, depending on the formality of the situation. An example of this would be, “Je sais pas,” “I don’t know,” but this can only be used in certain situations where one would be talking to a friend or someone close. Similarly in English, in dialects like BEV, double concord is acceptable, but it is not dependent on formality like it is in French. I do not think this difference is a problem of my transferring from one language to another because many native speakers that I have talked to use this negation. I think it might be possible that this difference is due to a parameter, but I’m not entirely sure what this parameter would be. Both English and French allow double negative concord or just a single negation in a sentence, but the hurdle to deciding whether or not this is truly a parameter of Universal Grammar would be that the two forms of negation arise in different situations in English and French. What is more likely, then, is that these two differences are due to different prescriptive rules governing the use of double negation in the two languages. In both, double negation is present, but in English it is seen as “improper” to use it, while in French, it is considered improper not to use a negative concord. As a result, this difference must be due to different prescriptive rules governing negative concord in the two languages.

The second difference between French English, and one that I regularly struggled with, is the different phonological rules governing pronunciation in the two languages. The biggest challenge I encountered was that of pronouncing the consonant “r” and the vowel “u.” With r, I found that my difficulty lay mostly in the fact that the French r is pronounced nothing like the English r. The French r is pronounced further back in the throat, so that to me, as a native English speaker, it feels like I am gurgling every time I say a word with the letter r in it. For u, the best way I was able to approximate its pronunciation was to pronounce the letter “w” in the normal fashion I would for English, but with slightly pursed lips so that it produces the French u. The reason for this is that in English, r is palatal, pronounced toward the back of the throat, but not as far back as the French r which is uvular. The reason for the different pronunciation of u is that the French u is a high back rounded vowel, while the English u is a near-high back rounded vowel. Another major phonological difference between the two languages that I struggled with is the presence of French oral vowels. There are nasal vowels in English, such as in sing, but they are nasal only because of a rule that converts a vowel preceding a nasalized consonant into a nasalized vowel, as in sing or impossible. In contrast, in French they are phonemes in their own right, and there are minimal pairs such as “beau and bon” “good and beautiful” that are differentiated only by whether the vowel is nasalized or not. Further examples of phonological differences can be found in other minimal pairs in the two languages. In French, the minimal pairs “rugi” and “rougi,” the past tense of blush and roar, and “pou” and “pu,” the noun louse and the past tense of the verb can, are often challenging for English speakers to discern because “ou” and “u” are two separate phonemes in French that sound almost identical. For a similar reason, the minimal pair ship and sheep is difficult for French speakers to discern. While these rules are not all of the phonological differences between French and English, they have been, in my experience, among the most obvious examples of differences that arise in everyday speech.