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French Language

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    I'm not sure I would even blame L'Académie Française here. Yes, they are conservative... but they're not the only ones. Any proposed reform tends to make the headlines, and every time there are scathing critiques, suggestions that the reform will kill French culture, etc... The (minimal) reform from 1990 is still a subject of contention. Commented Apr 2, 2024 at 14:24
  • @MatthieuM. I have just expanded the answer. In fact, the conservatism is not necessarily a negative thing here, as it preserves etymological spelling of words. Commented Apr 2, 2024 at 14:31
  • 1
    Indeed, I personally actually like that etymology is preserved. The word "éléfant" is just... alien to me. I just wanted to make it clear that it's not like the Académie Française is holding the French people hostage here, a significant part of the population agrees with their conservatism. Commented Apr 2, 2024 at 15:12
  • 5
    Although French spelling is certainly more conservative than various other Romance orthographies, it is still worth noting that a lot of the sound changes, even many of those particular to French, had already happened by the time French spelling started to separate from Latin, and lots of etymology from before then is lost even in French. For example, dîner and déjeuner are not written the same, despite being historically the same word (from Latin dis-jejunāre ‘de-fast = break the fast’), derived/borrowed at different stages of French. Commented Apr 2, 2024 at 15:32
  • 3
    A more sociological view of the resistance of the public against spelling reform is that the current system promotes social stratification by making full written proficiency impossible for a subset of speakers and limiting full access to the administrative and juridical system, as well as a lot of more lucrative employment opportunities, to those who have acquired that proficiency. This is true as well of the very large difference between registers that exists in French. Reforming the spelling system inevitably involves eroding the social capital language users have accumulated through (cont.) Commented Apr 3, 2024 at 6:15