Irony needed to defend language of Moliere

If French is under siege, English is the only assailant. Of the 2,500 new French words admitted to the language of Moliere between 1996 and 2000, only one - the German term hinterland - was not of English or American origin.

Stanching the onslaught of English words into French may be a losing battle, but at least four French groups - the Academie francaise, the Commission generale de terminologie et de neologie, la Francophonie and an association called Defense de la langue francaise - soldier on in their quixotic struggle.

Now a group of French writers calling themselves the Academie de la carpette has approached the problem with a sense of humour. In 1999, the 11-man jury awarded its first "prix de la carpette anglaise" to the Renault chairman, Louis Schweitzer, for talking about cars rather than voitures. The prize is reserved "for a member of the French elite who particularly distinguished himself through his determination to promote the domination of the Anglo-American language in France".

This year's winner is the French Defence Minister, Alain Richard. Monsieur Richard first came to the academy's attention when he sent out English-language invitations to a colloquium at the Ecole Militaire. His greatest sin though was ordering the French armed forces to adopt English as their operational language "in the perspective of a commitment within NATO, whose first language, English, must be spoken by all".

Honourable mentions went to the Agriculture Minister, Jean Glavany, who had the effrontery to call his website Frenchfoods, the millionaire Fran,cois Pinault, whose Printemps department store carried out an advertising campaign in English, and Jean-Cyril Spinetta, the chairman of Air France, for vainly trying to force his pilots to speak English with the control tower at Roissy Charles-deGaulle airport.

Globalisation and information technology - where France is en retard - are the main culprits of the latest tidal wave of anglicisms. Try as they might, the thought police cannot get French internauts to say toile instead of web, causette instead of chat, fouineur instead of hacker or numerizeur instead of scanner. They've been more successful at imposing ordinateur for computer, but gerbeur (in slang, a person who vomits) was never going to replace stacker.

Then there are the trend words - "trend" being one of them - that sneak into fashionable French. Bobo, the shortened version of the US journalist David Brook's term "bourgeois bohemian", is what every sympathique French person now aspires to. Who wouldn't want to be affluent and educated, but more interested in healthy exercise and friends than amassing dollars? That was what the yuppies (who also entered French) did in the 1980s, but it's passe now.

Yuffie (young urban fashionable flatsharer) is also used here, but you'll never hear jumco (jeune urbain modeux colocataire), the translation proposed by Le Monde.

Hype and hyper are French young people's favourite superlatives. Unlike English, where "hype" refers to misleading exaggeration, the French term is usually positive.

When President Jacques Chirac went on television on September 31st to denounce accusations of bribe-taking, he called a video-cassette recorded by a since dead party fundraiser abracadabrantesque. For 24 hours Mr Chirac's new word was a laughing stock, seen as proof of his nervousness over the scandal. Then the Elysee none too subtly drew the news agencies' attention to a verse by the 19th century poet Arthur Rimbaud: "Oh abracadabrantesque billows/Take my heart, that it be saved . . ."

Palestinians threw pebbles at the Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, in the West Bank after he made pro-Israeli statements last winter. Suddenly the words caillasser and caillassage - from caillou or pebble - were in every press report and commentary. Neither appear in my Petit Robert dictionary, but French colleagues assure me that youths in the banlieue have been pebbling French cops for a long time.