Keeping in touch with today's language

Oxford University Press' multi-million-pound research programme now includes a brand new initiative, the Oxford Languages Tracker, which enables us to track the latest developments across a range of modern languages in the most effective way. Every day, teams of wordsmiths scour a range of media, monitoring and tracking the latest trends in French, German, Russian, and Spanish from the moment they appear, for inclusion in our print and online dictionaries.

Bridget Patterson, a former teacher of Modern Languages, is now a freelance translator and a reader for the Oxford Languages Tracker. She is currently working on a collection of short stories by Irène Némirovsky, to be published by Persephone Books in April 2010. Read on to discover how her research is used as part of Oxford's commitment to publishing the most up-to-date and accurate dictionaries:

"After many years of teaching French and Italian, I decided to give myself a new lease of life and use my languages in a different way. So I embarked on an MA in Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia, which proved to be a really interesting and stimulating course, and last year I was invited to be a reader for the Oxford Languages Tracker programme for French dictionaries.

As part of a reader's work, I read Le Monde newspaper and my task is to find new words, unusual constructions, or words used in an unexpected context, which are not yet in the dictionary. I spend several hours a week doing this: firstly reading the paper thoroughly and highlighting words that strike me, then checking to see if they are already in the dictionary, as well as looking in my monolingual Robert dictionary.

You have to concentrate, have an eye for detail - and be prepared to read articles on subjects you're not necessarily interested in. Most of all, you must have a genuine passion for language and vocabulary (though it is also easy to get carried away and spend too much time researching a word or expression on French academic websites!)

Once I have a definitive list of words, I enter them on a spreadsheet. The word is quoted in its context and there is also a column for the number of Google hits, which can range from none to several million. At the end of every month I email in my collection to Oxford University Press.

From my research, I have seen some noticeable trends. The French have taken to feminising words in a big way: casteuse (female casting agent), écrivaine (author) and gouverneure (governor) are just three. I was amused by an article in Le Figaro in which this practice was strongly condemned as further wanton destruction of the French language.

There is an enormous amount of Anglo-Saxon borrowing, particularly in the financial pages: leveraging, trader and golden boys, for example. The use of the prefix cyber- is everywhere: cybertroqueur (someone who exchanges goods on-line, rather like our freecycle), cyberattaque, and so on. Linked to that is an increase in neologisms such as netizen — a citizen of the internet. Other neologisms are specific to France and often have an element of punning, such as beurgeoisie (to describe second generation middle-class North Africans), or jeunisme (the equivalent of ageism, only directed against the young.) Political terms and neologisms abound and cannot always be used as they are so transient, but I have come across some interesting examples: ségolâtre to describe a supporter of Ségolène Royal, the former leader of the Socialist party, or sarkoberlusconisme for that showman's blend of right-wing posturing seen in Sarkozy and his Italian counterpart. Some words are so French that it's impossible to find a way to turn them into English: how about àquoibonisme, describing an attitude for which you have to imagine a typical French shrug accompanying the question 'à quoi bon?' (what's the point?).

It's difficult to explain all this to people who are not linguists and they tend to glaze over, whereas those who read or write for a living can at once see how fascinating it is. It has certainly made a difference to how I read: I notice new words much more readily, wherever they occur. During a recent visit to France, for instance, I was struck by notices on motorways inviting drivers to covoiturer (car-share). And it's dramatically improved my French vocabulary; in fact I keep a parallel notebook by me for words that are already in the dictionary but that I didn't know. I also feel immensely satisfied that what I'm doing contributes to the work of creating Oxford's world-renowned dictionaries."

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