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Precisely, the OED is a record of language, not a guardian of it.

Obviously you are not British*. Of course Oxbridge's presses (OUP, CUP) are the guardian of English as much as L'Académie française is the guardian of the French (sorry, française) language. Don't let the Telegraph tell you any different.

* Wait, you may be. Sod it.

Forgot the reference, but it's obviously in French

Why not reinvent the wheel, the EU is doing it with Galileo to reivent GPS so why not reinvent Google as well? One possible reason is how protective of their native tounge the French are, they even have an institute l'Académie Française (translation ) dedicated to protecting it from contamination of foreign words! This battle is intense in the anglophone-dominated realm of the internet which the institue would rather refer to as toile d'arraigée-mondiale (TAM) rather than World Wide Web (WWW)

In France, the neologism étatsunien has been created and is widely used in the Wikipedia.

For instance, if the history of North America turned out differently and the area that is now Manitoba and Minnesota had become "NewFinnLand", do you think that the new country they would accept the imposition of a language "controlled" by a foreign country no matter how positive the relationships are. Even the French, who have a very centralised control of their language through the Academie Francaise are not in touch with the rest of the world. I think the last time they added a French term was 'courriel' for email. I can't think of the one previous to that.

I just want to reiterate that it is unfair to compare a language spoken as a first language by five million people in one country to a language used as a first language by close to half a billion people in dozens of countries all six inhabited continents.

I wonder what he, a Briton, would think of turning it over to the French? Will he object when the Academie Francaise demands that he write his articles only in French?

Chip H.

except for the Academie Francaise. This part of the French government controls which words are 'officially' to be used in France, and has been very aggressive about keeping English terms (such as email and computer) out of the language. It is against the law to use the word 'email' in France.

• The Academie Francaise isn't part of the gouvernment. They are an independent body whose main function is creating a reference dictionnary and handing out litterary prizes. See their site.
• "Computer" was never used in France, "ordinateur" was coined in response to a request by IBM (see posts below for details)
• Using "email" isn't and has never been illegal. There is a recomendation that "courriel" is used in its place for official documents issued by the government. The term was coined by the canadians and inserted into the language by the "Commission generale de terminologie et de neologie which is part of the Ministry of Culture.

You may now continue trolling, thank you for your attention.

Similarly, the French have l'Académie française, responsible for the French lexicon since Louis XIII. Of course, in other parts of the world, the language is butchered mercilessly. In parts of Québec and in northern Ontario, I have heard phrases like (overheard this one in a bar)

" 'ey boys! J'ai trouvé un lighter!"

Presumably, the fellow had found a lighter...

The introduction of English words into the French language in Québec prompted the provincial government many years ago to establish a 'language police' (the Office québécois de la langue française), charged with ensuring that product labels and outdoor signage in the province have appropriate French content. It's a losing battle, but it's amusing to watch the fight, sometimes.

If you have decided that you want to protect your language, then what's insane about being specific

If you have decided that you want to protect your language, then you have already committed yourself to insanity.

"Protecting" a language in this fashion is like declaring with force of law that a certain joke is funny or that a given piece of art is beautiful.

The apex of this idiocy, of course, is France's Academie Francaise, 40 white-haired and morally bankrupt old farts who determine which words shall or shall not be permitted to enter the French vocabulary, based on their presumed consistency with contrived principles of linguistic purity.

Where do people come up with this sort of thing? Do they think the French language was handed down from God in one piece on a silver platter? Do they not realize that all languages are the product of mixing and swirling and borrowing and growing?

Language is a tool. People use it to communicate with each other, and built upon that, the rest of society functions. There are advantages to maintaining a modicum of consistency in a language, because this reduces ambiguities and makes it easier for people to understand each other. But nobody is arguing that the introduction of foreign words or the use of English is making it hard for people to understand each other. They are arguing that the purity of the language is being compromised.

Leaving aside from the fallacious presumption that the language is magically "pure" today despite the fact that it's changed considerably over the years, this is fundamentally a sentimental issue. Some people like the language the way it is. That's fine. But sentiment neither requires nor deserves force of law. If it is important to people, they'll find ways to assist it. If they don't care, then it deserves all the government protection that the US gives to the sanctity of a bad '70s movie: A cultural product whose time has come and gone.

This is nothing more than one more form of the most childish and destructive of humankind's many throwback urges: nationalism. And any government that coddles or encourages this nonsense is doing a grave disservice to its people.