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For its part, French-speaker has adopted its own share of English words, many of them associated with the imposing influence of anglophone, and specifically American, culture. Terms in business and technology are the preponderant categories. Words like leader and leadership, management, challenge, blog, open space, start-up and even job itself have so permeated the French language that elected officials and business leaders use them, though not always without criticism.

Unlike the United States, France has a single authoritative body on the French language, though its rulings are only advisory. The Académie Française was established by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635, and consists of 40 members (known as Immortals) who consult and rule on issues of the French language. The academy, situated in the Institut de France building overlooking the Seine and the Pont des Arts in Paris’s sixth arrondissement, also publishes a dictionary. It is presently at work on a ninth edition.

Despite its rulings, and attempts to keep the influence of foreign words at bay, the Academy has accepted words from English and other languages. Some examples are barbecue, flash-back, best-seller, baffle and gospel. Yet it fought to keep words like “e-mail” out of the French lexicon, instead attempting to have the word courriel (a French-Canadian word that is itself a portmanteau of courrier éléctronique, meaning “electronic mail”) replace it. The French government agreed, and in 2003, banned the word e-mail from all official documents, using courriel instead. And yet courriel hasn’t taken root among the wider public, proving that such attempts are at the mercy of the organic and even capricious fashion in which language and terminology evolve. After all, other computer terms like télécharger, meaning “to download,” and base de données (database) and disque dur (hard drive) are in common use without reference to their English counterparts.

The majority of English-language words in French, however, are not merely direct adaptations like job, leader, and babysitting. They are what are known as pseudo-anglicisms: English words whose usage in French is either not exactly the same as in English or even completely different. Examples: baskets, which refer to sports shoes, or catch, the term for professional wrestling. Many English language gerunds are used as nouns in French, such as a jogging (a tracksuit), a parking (a parking lot or garage), a shampooing (shampoo), a smoking (tuxedo), zapping (channel-surfing), and relooking (makeover).

Some of the English words that have crept into the French language have done so because they fill a gap. Brunch, for example, was adopted when the meal itself became a popular feature at restaurants on Sundays.  And yet there are other instances where French has adopted English terms despite having existing words. Coming full circle, the world of fashion—long considered the specialty of the French—is increasingly incorporating English words often in pseudo-anglicist form. The word fashion itself is used as an adjective to indicate something fashionable, the same with the word trendy, despite the words mode and tendance, respectively.