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Who gets to call a usage wrong
The year has been circling this question since the aeroplane in lesson 54, and Aminata asks it from the position that matters: her own usage is the one being judged. **The institutional picture.** French has an unusually centralised tradition of language authority — the Académie française since 1635, a strong normative grammar culture, dictionaries published in Paris, and until recently an educational system that treated regional and colonial varieties as deviations. None of this has legal force over speech, but it shapes what appears in reference works, what is marked wrong in an exam, and what a speaker is told about their own French. The practical consequence is the one Alex ran into: a word used daily by tens of millions of people may be absent from the dictionary on his phone. **What has changed.** Considerably, in the last few decades. Francophone lexicography now actively records regional usage: the 'Inventaire des particularités lexicales du français en Afrique noire' documented thousands of items, Belgian, Québécois and Swiss dictionaries exist and are respected, and major French dictionaries now include regional labels rather than silence. The Organisation internationale de la Francophonie promotes a plural conception of the language explicitly. Linguists have described varieties rather than ranking them for a century. **What has not changed.** The asymmetry of prestige. A Parisian usage is unmarked; a Dakar usage is labelled. Examinations in Senegal are marked against a standard written elsewhere, with real consequences for real children, as lesson 84 described. And the experience Aminata reports — inventing something useful and being told it is a mistake — happens, and is irritating in a way that is hard to argue somebody out of. **Where the disagreement actually lies.** Not between linguists and purists, who are not really arguing about the same thing, but inside francophone Africa. Some writers and educators argue for actively valorising African French, teaching it as legitimate and codifying it. Others argue that in a country where French is the language of examinations and international work, teaching a standard that matches the one used elsewhere serves students' interests better than affirming local usage — and that the people who can afford to celebrate non-standard varieties are often the ones whose children already have the standard. Both positions are held by people who care about the same children. **This course takes no position**, and has one practical thing to say. Aminata's answer in line 9 is the linguist's answer and also the useful one: usage comes first and reference works follow. For your own French, that means your Paris-flavoured standard is a perfectly good place to speak from, and it does not license you to correct anybody. If somebody says 'ambiancer' and your dictionary disagrees, the dictionary is the thing that is incomplete.