Les Linguistes Atterrées
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"'The purist jungle?'" (3/27/2026) featured Anne Abeillé's book "La Grammaire se Rebelle". As background, I should have cited "Le français va très bien, merci", Tract des linguistes 5/23/2023 (= "French is doing very well, thank you").
Note the greyed-out third E in ATTERRÉES on the tract's cover, representing a gender-neutral orthographic form for atterré(e)s = "appalled":
The blurb on the group's home page:
« Nous, linguistes, sommes proprement atterrées par l’ampleur de la diffusion d’idées fausses sur la langue française, par l’absence trop courante, dans les programmes scolaires comme dans l’espace médiatique, de référence aux acquis les plus élémentaires de notre discipline. L’accumulation de déclarations catastrophistes sur l’état actuel de notre langue a fini par empêcher de comprendre son immense vitalité, sa fascinante et perpétuelle faculté à s’adapter au changement, et même par empêcher de croire à son avenir ! Il y a urgence à y répondre. »
"We, as linguists, are truly appalled by the sheer scale of the dissemination of misconceptions regarding the French language—and by the all-too-common absence, both in school curricula and in the media landscape, of any reference to the most elementary findings of our discipline. The accumulation of alarmist pronouncements regarding the current state of our language has ultimately obscured its immense vitality and its fascinating, perpetual capacity to adapt to change—going so far as to undermine belief in its very future! It is a matter of urgent necessity to address this."
The group has lots of relevant clips on YouTube — but the search results are slightly different by adjectival gender:
This 6/14/2023 France 24 interview with Anne Abeillé starts with her answer to the question "Pourquoi atterrées?" (= "Why appalled?"):
And there was a theatrical version of the group's manifesto at the Théâtre de la Concorde, 2/7/2026, described here:
On était hyper inquiets parce que le théâtre avait fait du surbooking
1000 réservations pour 600 places !!
Le public est venu en masse…
Le théâtre était plein comme un œuf, jusqu’au 2e balcon.
We were incredibly worried because the theater had overbooked—
1,000 reservations for 600 seats!!
The audience turned out in force…
The theater was packed to the rafters—right up to the second balcony.
That response validates my impression that the Linguistes Atterré(e)s movement is "more striking […] than its equivalent would be in the English-speaking world".
One of the theatrical segments featured Anne on the topic of Les Règles Zombies:
I couldn't locate a video for the performance — please let me know if you find one.
Robert Coren said,
April 5, 2026 @ 9:38 am
I'm amused by "plein comme un œuf" ("full as an egg").
Chris Button said,
April 5, 2026 @ 11:44 am
"Surbooking" is a nice one
David Marjanović said,
April 5, 2026 @ 3:54 pm
French does have headline capitalization, but it doesn't work the same as in English: only nouns are capitalized apart from the first word in the headline. "Les Linguistes atterré(e)s" is the most you can get.
German, I can't restrain myself from mentioning, has no separate capitalization rules for headlines at all.
Olaf Zimmermann said,
April 5, 2026 @ 10:19 pm
One thing puzzles me: after the last spelling reform (yes, the French do that from time to time) the gratuitous circonflexe in "théâtre", etymologically nonsensical as it is, had been scrapped. So what's it doing here?
Chris Button said,
April 7, 2026 @ 7:48 am
@ David Marjanović
Don't forget flipped titles on spines of books across different languages in Europe. That can also be inconsistent too.
@ Olaf Zimmermann
Aren't both now acceptable?
Also, I'm not sure if a lost "s" is the only regular source of the circumflex (I assume you're referring to that well-known origin?)
David Marjanović said,
April 7, 2026 @ 7:58 am
It's the most common source of the circumflex, but by no means the only one, especially in loanwords.
The spelling reform seems to have been mostly ignored (remarkably enough). Part of the reason may be that Standard French accents in France (let alone elsewhere) that distinguish a /a/ from â, -as /ɑ/ still exist.
I never noticed a correlation with languages there; it's definitely inconsistent within German at the very least.