The newest official guardian of the French language has spoken: English, he says, is jumping the barricades and threatening the language of Moliere.

He should know. He’s British — the first from his nation to become one of the 40 esteemed “immortals” of the Academie Francaise, the institution that has watched over the French language since 1635.

Is he a fox in the hen house — as one might think given the history of mutual disdain between England and France? “No,” Michael Edwards assures. “Nor am I the Trojan Horse. I don’t want to stir things up.”

But he just might.

Edwards, a Cambridge-educated poet, writer and translator married to a French woman, says that while he became a French citizen a decade ago, his British identity is “essential.” More.

See: National Post

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