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by seszett 704 days ago
> Meanwhile in France, their language regulators fight tirelessly to invent new calques for English loanwords to stop the "Anglicization of French", as if that were a thing that needed to be stopped.

That's something one hears quite often from English speakers but I don't really know where this myth comes from.

French is a quite decentralised language with each country having its own "regulator" but none of them have legal power. They are all just advisory organisations. Many the one with the most power is the OQLF in Québec. The French ministry of education decides what is taught in France and some of its reforms are sometimes followed by the other countries, but they don't deal with vocabulary itself, mostly orthography.

The Académie Française does invent words, but they have no official value or power. Their main occupation is documenting actual usage.

Most other European languages do have international, language wide regulators though, often with actual legal value, but French doesn't have anything like this.

I think it all comes down to English speakers knowing even less about the other languages than they know about French.