According to the German IT news website Heise Online, the guardians of the French language known as the Commission Générale de Terminologie et de Néologie have thought up (PDF, French) their own word for the English term “hashtag” which is widely used on the internet, particularly on the social media site Twitter. In the language of Voltaire the term for the keyword in tweets will in future be officially termed “mot-dièse”. “Dièse” is French for the hash symbol “#”, with which keywords in tweets are labelled, whilst “mot” is “word”, of course.
This attempt to preserve the purity of the French language was mainly met with ridicule on the internet. Heise’s report states that one Twitter user’s reaction after the publication of the new word in the French Official Journal on Wednesday, 23rd January was: “Apart from people of 70, who is seriously going to use this term?”
Will it catch on? Only time will tell; ultimately it’s those who use the language that determine its direction rather than any committee.
Update: since I first posted this article my French friend Julien has emailed to say: “Why the heck didn’t they choose the same word as Canada? “Mot-clic” makes way more sense…”. I cannot argue with that. 🙂
“Apart from people of 70, who is seriously going to use this term?”
The same thing was said when courriel was decreed as a word, yet it is quite commonly used. I expect this will be shortened to dièse and wondered why it wasn’t used in the first place. Probably due to it being seen as hip and with it to use English words, even though more often than not they sound ghastly coming out of a Frenchman’s mouth.
Thanks for your comment, Richard. Even though languages are dynamic and constantly changing, neologisms always encounter some resistance.
For readers unfamiliar with French, courriel is the word the French coined a while ago for email. It’s a contraction of courrier électronique.