The AI glossary in french: the return of anglicisms

Abstract

We offer a lexical analysis of the various words, phrases, and acronyms used in French to refer to components and aspects of AI (artificial intelligence) use. Most of them are Anglicisms, whose use has not really been stopped by the various ministerial terminology commissions, which are supposed to defend French as the national language. We will also analyze several discursive contexts, taken from the French press, in which these lexemes are used, in order to highlight their integration into the language. Cases of lexical derivation will also be studied, with the aim of highlighting the same process of lexico-semantic integration. We will analyze words such as chatbot, chatter, and overfitting; phrases such as feature engineering, AI governance, algorithmic audit, and digital sovereignty; and acronyms such as AI and GDPR. This brand-new, rich, and complex lexicon marks a new period of borrowing from English into French, with the massive return of Anglicisms into contemporary French.