Your Wrong is part of a larger three year research project, Prescriptivism in Popular Culture, which aims to raise awareness of prescriptivism across different popular culture media. The project focuses primarily on French-language contexts, but this website welcomes submissions in any language.

France is often described as being a highly prescriptivist society. You may well have read about their language academy, the Académie française. International newspapers often discuss changes to the language that the academy has proposed or the latest anglicism that they’ve taken a dislike to.

But it’s not just these big institutions who are telling us how we should and shouldn’t use language. We can find prescriptivism in all sorts of everyday contexts, including television, popular fiction, politics and even graffiti.

This is nothing new. There are examples of this in France for over five centuries. What’s new about my project is that I want to find out more about how and where prescriptivism pops up in contemporary French popular culture, the extent to which it is found, and its topics and themes.

Why is this important?

Prescriptivism can be used to silence and exclude certain people. If you don’t have the “right” accent or you make spelling “mistakes”, you might find yourself being judged. This is because “correct” language use has cultural capital and anything short of perfectly correct language use is often judged negatively. And this idea is often unquestioned. Many people think that’s just common sense. We should all just use “correct” language.

This has inevitable consequences for diversity: how we speak, write and sign reflects parts of our identity. Maybe it’s our regional origins, our gender, or our ethnicity. If we are being judged for how we use language, then we are also being judged for these characteristics.

If we can raise awareness and understanding of prescriptivism, and how these ideas are shared and reinforced in society, we can begin to challenge them.

About the researcher

The project is run by Dr Emma Humphries (she/her), a researcher based at Queen’s University Belfast and is funded by the Leverhulme Trust. Emma’s research interests are in sociolinguistics, particularly in language attitudes and ideologies, and language policy.

Previously, Emma has worked on two AHRC-funded projects: ‘Foreign, indigenous and community languages in the devolved regions of the UK: policy and practice for growth’ (Queen’s University Belfast) and ‘Promoting Language Policy’ (University of Cambridge).

She has also taught on degrees involving linguistics and French and Francophone studies at the following institutions: Cardiff University; Paris VII; Queen’s University Belfast; the University of Birmingham; and the University of Nottingham.

Emma’s first book, ‘Linguistic Insecurities and Authorities: 19th- and 21st-century language commentary on French’, is being published by John Benjamins and will be released in Spring 2025.

Research outputs

Book

Spring 2025. Humphries, Emma. Linguistic Insecurities and Authorities: 19th- and 21st-century language commentary on French. John Benjamins.

Journal Articles

2024. Humphries, Emma, Janice Carruthers and Leanne Henderson. ‘Qualifications in home languages: Opportunities, barriers and policy implications’, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. DOI: 10.1080/01434632.2023.2288292

2023. Humphries, Emma. ‘Croient or croivent: French language commentary on Twitter’, Nottingham French Studies, 62(3), pp.314-333. DOI: 10.3366/nfs.2023.0391.  

2023. Humphries, Emma and Wendy Ayres-Bennett. ‘The hidden face of public language policy in the UK’, Current Issues in Language Planning, 23(5), pp.503-533. DOI: 10.1080/14664208.2022.2150497.  

2023. Humphries, Emma and Wendy Ayres-Bennett. ‘The hidden face of the UK’s public language policy’, Languages, Society and Policy, pp.1-9. DOI: 10.17863/CAM.100155.  

2019. Humphries, Emma. ‘#JeSuisCirconflexe: The French spelling reform of 1990 and 2016 reactions’, Journal of French Language Studies, 29(3), pp.305-321, DOI: 10.1017/S0959269518000285.  

Chapters in edited volumes

2024. Humphries, Emma. ‘Comparing the prescriptivism of nineteenth- and twenty-first-century language experts in France’, in Janice Carruthers, Mairi McLaughlin and Olivia Walsh (eds.), Historical and sociolinguistic approaches to French, pp.276-96. OUP.

2023. Walsh, Olivia and Emma Humphries. ‘Prescriptivism in French: the case of France and Quebec’, in J. Beal, M. Lukač and R. Straaijer (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Prescriptivism, pp.427-46. Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/9781003095125.  

Book reviews

2024. Humphries, Emma. ‘McLaughlin Mairi. La Presse française historique : Histoire d’un genre et histoire de la langue. (Histoire et évolution du français, 7). Paris : Classiques Garnier, 2021, 407 pp. 978 2 406 10356 1’, Journal of French Language Studies, pp. 1–2. DOI: 10.1017/S0959269524000140.