Do the French know their “ognons”?

A grammatical ding dong is currently engaging the minds of French intellectuals (all the French consider themselves intellectuals), and the furore is about the proposal to abolish the circumflex accent, that funny hat-like object that hovers over all the French vowels.

This revolutionary change was first proposed and agreed 26 years ago by the Académie Française, but fears of a linguistic civil war has presumably meant that no-one dared implement the change until now.

The story has done the rounds of social media and various bigwigs have pronounced on the subject. Je suis circonflexe appeared on Twitter and Facebook, the epicentre of cultural discourse.  “La mort de l’accent circonflexe”, “L’accent circonflexe va disparaître à la rentrée”, “Adieu circonflexe, la réforme de l’orthographe va s’appliquer en septembre.” The truth of course is that reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated, although some publishers have apparently included the new spellings in school text books.

Le Monde brought in the heavy artillery: Non, l’accent circonflexe ne va pas disparaître (if it did disappear, disparaître would be one of the words it would disappear from, ironically)

So what is the truth of the matter? We were taught in our philology lectures that in certain words the circumflex represented a now vanished “s”. It can also alter the pronunciation of the vowel upon which the accent reposes. In all, around 2,400 words are likely to be affected if everyone observes the change. Coût (cost) can now lose its adornment, whilst paraître (to appear) will become plain and simple paraitre.

If you happen to be doing a prose translation for your A levels you will need to note that “dû” preserves its headgear, to distinguish it from the preposition “du”. “Mur” and “mûr”

are similarly allowed a separate identity.

Not sure how my old French teacher is going to react to this.