British students’ fascination for the subject of franglais is often inversely proportional to the quality of the work it generates on French linguistics courses. Indeed, knowing the belief among some undergraduates that ‘whatever the question is, the answer's franglais’, I’ve come to approach the subject with dread, or avoid it altogether. For this reason the publication of an informative and lucid guide, treating Anglo-American borrowing in all its dimensions, is particularly welcome. Bogaards’ book is a timely and sober riposte to Étiemble's Parlez vous franglais?, a book once described by Thody (Reference Thody1995) as ‘bad-tempered’ but which still sells well in its ‘je ne sais la quantième édition’ over forty years after initial publication.

The book starts with some helpful reminders: that the historical influence of French on English is considerably greater than in the reverse direction, that franglais hardly constitutes a language since it consists primarily of nouns, and that the term mot d’emprunt itself is something of a misnomer. All of these essentially familiar points are made with a lightness of touch which eludes Étiemble, and the author concludes, not unreasonably: ‘je ne crois pas qu’il y ait vraiment péril en la demeure’ (p. 13), which will come as no surprise to linguists.

Part I, ‘Les anglicismes du français’, takes up roughly half the book and recalls the franglais grammar which makes up Part III of Étiemble's book. The findings here are well researched, drawing on the work of Hagège, Foley and Humbley among others, but for the most part not new. While lexical influence has been significant, other linguistic levels remain largely unaffected: claims for English influence on syntax in particular often rest on shaky ground (as for example in the case of adjective position). A lexicographer by training, Bogaards is less sure-footed in the area of phonology: some of his discussion of nasal consonants is ill-informed, and there are inaccuracies in IPA notation. The analysis of English lexical influence (Chapter 6), however, is impressive. Bogaards concludes, like others before him, but on the basis of his own detailed research, that the percentage of recent anglicisms in texts is rarely more than 2% and usually less: he suggests a figure of around 0.8%. This makes the disproportionate French response to the perceived threat seem puzzling: a theme Bogaards addresses in Part II ‘La défense du français’. By far the most original and impressive of its five chapters is Chapter 10, which devotes 34 pages to a detailed forensic critique of Étiemble himself. Bogaards starts by dissecting the technique, in his opening Histoire pas drôle, by which Étiemble paints a distorted picture of Anglo-American influence, noting the errors, wild exaggerations, and apparently invented examples deployed to support his case. Étiemble is accused not unfairly of ‘un désir boulimique de fournir de plus en plus d’exemples choquants de ces anglicismes hideux’ (p. 109) and later of an ‘anti-américanisme obsessionel et parfois incohérent’ (p. 131). Étiemble's problems with linguistics as a discipline are explored, as is the rather arm's length relationship which generally obtained between the self-appointed defenders of French and their would-be mentor. Having taken the trouble to examine Parlez vous franglais? in the context of Étiemble's teaching and other published work, Bogaards draws an intriguing parallel between the adolescent rebellion of André, the narrator of his semi-autobiographical first novel L’enfant de choeur and Étiemble's own relationship with the United States. Chapter 12, ‘Les structures de défense du français’, is by comparison a rather dull read, and one half-suspects this was the author's intention, as he sets out to enumerate some of the more important bodies charged with “defending” the French language, while acknowledging that they are too numerous for him to do them justice. Chapter 13 offers a well-informed discussion of anti-franglais legislation, which might have paid more attention to the problems of implementation that these laws have suffered. The 1984 Steiner trial (under the Bas-Lauriol law), for example, was well documented in the contemporary press (see Hornsby Reference Hornsby1998), and the chapter might also have benefited from Rodney Ball's (Reference Ball1997) interesting and amusing observations on the Assemblée Nationale debates on the 1994 Toubon law. The author's final conclusions – that the fight against franglais is predominantly an élite concern, that legislation has been largely ineffective, and that prescribed equivalent terms remain largely unassimilated – are reasonable and well-founded, but again, hardly new.

The book has one or two structural problems: Chapters 7 and 11 might have been merged, as indeed might 1 and 5. There are also some misrenderings or mistranslations of English in addition to the IPA errors mentioned above. For the most part, though, this book is well researched, informative and highly readable. Compulsory reading for my undergraduates, at least.