New Book Release: 'Émigrés. French Words That Turned English' by Richard Scholar

Princeton University Press, 2020

emigres scholar

 

The fascinating history of French words that have entered the English language and the fertile but fraught relationship between English- and French-speaking cultures across the world.

 

English has borrowed more words from French than from any other modern foreign language. French words and phrases—such as à la modeennuinaïveté and caprice—lend English a certain je-ne-sais-quoi that would otherwise elude the language. Richard Scholar examines the continuing history of untranslated French words in English and asks what these words reveal about the fertile but fraught relationship that England and France have long shared and that now entangles English- and French-speaking cultures all over the world.

Émigrés demonstrates that French borrowings have, over the centuries, “turned” English in more ways than one. From the seventeenth-century polymath John Evelyn’s complaint that English lacks “words that do so fully express” the French ennui and naïveté, to George W. Bush’s purported claim that “the French don’t have a word for entrepreneur,” this unique history of English argues that French words have offered more than the mere seasoning of the occasional mot juste. They have established themselves as “creolizing keywords” that both connect English speakers to—and separate them from—French. Moving from the realms of opera to ice cream, the book shows how migrant French words are never the same again for having ventured abroad, and how they complete English by reminding us that it is fundamentally incomplete.

At a moment of resurgent nationalism in the English-speaking world, Émigrés invites native Anglophone readers to consider how much we owe the French language and why so many of us remain ambivalent about the migrants in our midst.

 

2020 Émigrés: French Words That Turned English, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 256 pp.

The author: Richard Scholar is a Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Durham University. 

Don't miss these two online book presentations:
 

Richard Scholar will present his book at the Durham Book Festival on Saturday 17th October at 12pm (GMT).
To register for the screening please visit https://durhambookfestival.com/programme/event/the-multilingual-pleasures-of-english-with-professor-richard-scholar/.

Sarah Hickmott and Richard Scholar will be presenting their new books at a joint launch event on Wednesday 28 October at 3pm (GMT).
(Sarah Hickmott’s book is Music, Philosophy and Gender in Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, Badiou (Edinburgh University Press).
Please join them on Zoom: https://durhamuniversity.zoom.us/j/93222723948?pwd=K2NEUjdFRi9HYzBSMUtoMVdMTHE4QT09.