Forty immortals versus le week-end
France has spent nearly four centuries appointing guardians to keep its language pure. The quiet joke of the whole enterprise is that the guardians have never once been in charge.
On the left bank of the Seine, under a domed seventeenth-century palace, forty people hold one of the strangest jobs on earth. They are elected for life, they wear a green coat embroidered with olive branches, they carry a ceremonial sword, and they are charged with nothing less than the protection of the French language. They are the Académie française, and they are known, without much irony, as les immortels — the immortals.
The name is not a boast about their talent. It comes from the seal that Cardinal Richelieu pressed onto the Academy’s founding charter in 1635, which bore the motto À l’immortalité — “to immortality.” Richelieu, chief minister to Louis XIII, had taken a private circle of Paris writers who met to argue about books and turned it into an organ of the state. Their commission was clear: to give the French language “certain rules,” to make it pure, eloquent and capable of treating the arts and sciences — and, above all, to compile the definitive dictionary of French.
Nearly four hundred years later they are still at it. And the history of their trying is one of the great, gentle comedies of language: an institution built to command words, discovering again and again that words do not take orders.
A dictionary in no hurry
Start with the dictionary, because it tells the story in miniature. The Academy set to work on its Dictionnaire almost at once. The first edition appeared in 1694 — nearly sixty years after the founding. Sixty years. A child born the year the immortals began could have died of old age before they reached the letter Z.
That was not a one-off. The ninth edition — the current one — was begun in 1986 and its final volume was completed only in 2024, presented to President Macron that November. Thirty-eight years, for roughly 53,000 words. By several accounts a single letter could take more than a year to finish, which means that entries drafted early in the project were describing the language of a world that had since acquired the smartphone, the search engine and the social network. A dictionary can be many things; one thing it cannot be, at that pace, is current.
The immortals write for eternity. The trouble is that everyone else is talking right now.
None of this is incompetence. It is the nature of the task. A committee deliberating word by word, in search of the timeless and the correct, is simply moving at a different speed from a hundred million mouths inventing, borrowing and discarding as they go. The dictionary is a photograph of a river taken with a very long exposure.
The war on borrowed words
The immortals’ second great labour is defensive: holding back the tide of English. For decades the Academy has flagged anglicisms creeping into French — and France’s official language bodies, working alongside it, have dutifully manufactured home-grown replacements to be published in the Journal officiel and used in government texts.
Some of these coinages worked. Logiciel beat “software” and is now simply the French word. Ordinateur long ago won out over “computer.” And courriel — a neat blend of courrier (mail) and électronique, championed in French-speaking Canada and made official in France in 2003 — carved out a real place for itself in officialdom and in Quebec, even as plenty of French people kept saying mail or email.
Others were quiet disasters. In 2013, the official terminology commission, with the Academy’s blessing, decreed that the French for “hashtag” would be mot-dièse — literally “sharp-word,” after the musical sign. It was mocked almost immediately, partly because the musical sharp and the actual # are not even the same symbol, and it was then comprehensively ignored. Studies of French social media found that people went on typing hashtag exactly as before. (Quebec’s rival coinage, mot-clic, fared rather better on its own side of the Atlantic — a reminder that even the successes are local.)
And then there is the word the Academy has never managed to do anything about at all. The French, cheerfully, go away for le week-end. They do le shopping, find things cool, chase le buzz. No decree has dislodged any of it. The borrowed words simply moved in, unpacked, and stayed — some of them, like week-end, so thoroughly at home that the Academy’s own dictionary now lists them.
When the immortals follow
The most telling moments are the ones where the guardians stop resisting and quietly turn to follow. For most of its history the Academy insisted that a great many professions took only the masculine form: a woman in charge was Madame le ministre, a woman writing was, grammatically, un auteur. Usage, meanwhile, had been busy feminising the language for years, in newspapers, offices and ordinary speech.
In February 2019, the Academy gave way. It adopted a report finding “no obstacle in principle” to the feminisation of job titles — la ministre, une auteure, la professeure — and only two of the immortals voted against. An institution that exists to lead the language had, on this at least, been overtaken by it and chose to catch up. That is not failure. It is the system working the way language always works: the speakers move first, and the record follows.
It would be easy to read all this as mockery of the Academy, but that misses the better lesson. The immortals are serious, learned people doing careful, valuable work — the Dictionnaire is a genuine treasure, and a shared sense of “good” French has real cultural worth. They have simply been handed an impossible brief. You can tend a language, defend it, love it and describe it. You cannot own it, because it does not belong to any forty people. It belongs to whoever is using it today.
Where vocabla fits
There is a temptation, when you learn a language, to imagine that somewhere there exists an official version — a correct list of what each word means, handed down by an authority, that you simply have to install in your head. The story of the immortals is the clearest proof that no such thing exists. Even in the country with the most powerful language academy on earth, the real French is the one being spoken, not the one being decreed. Mot-dièse was official; hashtag was real.
That is the grain vocabla is cut along, in French and five other languages besides. A word is not an entry to be memorised from a table and defended forever; it is a living habit you pick up in the sentences where it actually lives, heard in many real voices, until you use it the way a native speaker does — not because a book told you to, but because you have met it often enough that it is simply yours. The immortals have spent four centuries learning the hard way what every learner eventually feels: a language is settled in the mouth, not on the seal.