Welcome back, French learners. For this word of the week blog, we’re breaking the rules by looking at two words in tandem – langue and langage.
The reason for this will soon become clear, but first, listen to the pronunciation of each word:
These words might seem familiar to English speakers. Both langue and langage can mean ‘language’, which is probably just what you had in mind? But in a way, this also makes them false friends, as they have other meanings and even define the concept of ‘language’ in very different ways…
As for the grammar, both words are nouns, however:
- Langue is a feminine noun
- Langage is a masculine noun
It might be useful to refresh your memory with our Easy Learning French Grammar page on how to work out the gender of nouns.
So, we mentioned that ‘language’ is one of the shared English translations. But each of the French words define this in a different way, while we have the same word in English no matter what.
For langue, which also means ‘tongue’, this is close to the most common English sense of language. This is the word you’d use to talk about French, Greek, Urdu, ‘my native language’ and so on. One way to remember this is thinking about the connection to ‘tongue’ and how this relates to speaking a language.
Let’s look at some examples:
tirer la langue to stick one’s tongue out
une langue morte an extinct language
Quelles langues pouvez-vous parler ? Which languages can you speak?
Mon fils avait quatre ans quand il a commencé à apprendre les langues étrangères. My son was four when he started learning foreign languages.
C’est ma langue maternelle. It’s my mother tongue/native language.
Langage is the word you’d use in relation to things like linguistics and systems of languages, which could be abstract rather than concrete. This might include concepts like computational (coding) languages or body language. Or think about a phrase like ‘please don’t use that kind of language’, where ‘language’ really means your word choice or expressions.
Let’s get into some examples using langage:
langage du corps body langage
Le langage de programmation le plus utilisé est Python. The most used programming language is Python.
Autrefois j’ai étudié le japonais, mais je n’ai aucune idée du langage courant. In the past I studied Japanese, but I have no idea about everyday speech/current ways of speaking.
Les intelligences artificielles ont toujours du mal à écrire en langage naturel. Artificial intelligence still has difficulty writing in natural language.
Thanks for reading this week’s blog. Will you come back every Monday to keep learning and improving your vocabulary? Yes?! Well, now you’re speaking our language!
Written by Holly Tarbet, freelance copywriter and editor.
All opinions expressed on this blog are those of the individual writers, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of Collins, or its parent company, HarperCollins.
