Ah, weekends....

Well, the arrival of the weekend reminds us that the weather is no respecter of the weather forecast. Or national boundaries, indeed. Our youngest son has just telephoned us to let us know he's en route to Paris, having spent the past month with three friends touring Europe. Well, that's the sort of thing you will probably only ever do when you're a student, but he's survived the bull run in Spain, the heat wave in the South of France, the German Police doing midnight passport checks, the young man's delights of Amsterdam, the excesses of Prague and a broken toe, somewhere between the Czech republic and the linguistically challenged Hungary. Hungary, he tells us, is the only place in Europe where the denizens of that ancient country speak fewer languages than the British. Which set us thinking.

In the 1980s, France decided that the English language - or at least that version of it spoken by the Americans - was far too widespread in their country, and set about eliminating all Anglicised words from the French dictionary, or Dictionnaire français, as they say in Gaul. First word for the chop was 'weekend', followed quickly by 'burger', 'sandwich' and 'footie'. Now, the French have always enjoyed a hate-hate relationship with us; the 100 years war didn't really resolve much, and they've always regarded their language as something sacrosanct. In Canada, they managed to make French the official (and only) language in Quebec, an action followed swiftly by the mass migration of most of their most skilled workers to other provinces, but the gradual erosion of their position as the number 1 international language since the 1960s has cut deep - wounded them to le core, as it were. The advent of Satellite Television, showing films in English with national subtitles, however, has meant that vast tracts of European youth has adopted English as their second language. Some, in fact, are so astonishingly good at it it's hard to know where they were born, The Dutch, for instance, routinely speak about five or six languages and do so with impressive skill, so much that it's earned them the epithet 'Linguists of Europe'.

Now this preciousness about their language isn't confined to France, of course, but they're the most obvious about it. What the French (and every other culture that protests they're losing their language) singularly overlook is that language is dynamic. At school in the '60s we were told that French was the international language. Now there's no doubt whatsoever that English has become the international language but en route to that heady aspiration it has evolved. It's no longer the language that existed 50 years ago and in that evolution it has integrated - like the Ancient Romans as they conquered Europe - all the other languages into its vocabulary.

So to the French who are terrified that their Language will be lost we would say this: au contraire, do not be laissez-faire about your language which is, after all, merely a collage of thoughts over the years. It is a propos, and has been for years, to use many Gallic extrapolations in our linguistic accoutrements, and the truly adroit know this, remain au courant with the changes and discard verbal bric-a-brac, without being blasé. And now, we're off to the café...