Borrowed, Butchered, Beloved: French Loanwords in Everyday Life
We all know terms from foreign languages like French, German, Japanese, or Spanish that have quietly settled into our everyday vocabulary. Words so familiar we hardly think of them as “foreign” anymore. Think of restaurant, kindergarten, tsunami, or canyon.
🐄 Why “Cow” Becomes “Beef”
After the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, English absorbed a flood of French vocabulary, especially in areas like law, nobility, and food. The Anglo-Saxon peasants who tended the animals used words like cow, pig, sheep, and deer. But once those animals became meals, their names changed: the Norman aristocrats, who spoke French, called them beef, pork, mutton, and venison. So the animal kept its Old English (Germanic) name, while the prepared meat got a French one. Because, quite literally, the person raising it and the person eating it weren’t speaking the same language.
French has long reigned supreme in the culinary world, and many of its food-related terms still dominate today, even if they’ve been mispronounced, misspelled, or half-lost along the way. Think sauté, hors d’œuvre, mise en place, julienne, words that lend a certain elegance (or confusion) to recipes and menus alike.
🧑🍳 Maître d’
This term comes from maître d’hôtel, which referred to the head of staff in a noble household, later adopted to mean the head waiter in a fine restaurant. English speakers, however, clipped the phrase awkwardly, keeping only “maître d’” and, amusingly, holding on to the French preposition d’ (short for de, meaning “of”) as if it were part of the noun. Possibly, “maître” on its own sounded too vague or unfamiliar to English ears, so “maître d’” stuck, a pseudo-title that now feels perfectly normal in English-speaking restaurants.
🧑🍳 Chef
In French, chef simply means “leader” or “boss”. It could refer to a company director, a police chief, or a military commander. The full expression chef de cuisine means “kitchen boss.” But when English borrowed the word, it trimmed off the rest and narrowed the meaning: in English, a chef is specifically a cook, usually a professional or head cook. Ironically, French keeps using cuisinier for “cook,” while English crowned chef as the culinary king.
Now here’s where it gets fun. To my surprise, I started noticing these French loanwords in Sweden too, and I couldn't help but laugh at how they’d been "Swedishified." The pronunciation and spelling got a local twist, but the French roots are still clear.
So how did French words end up in Swedish? It mostly happened in the 17th and 18th centuries, when French was the language of diplomacy, aristocracy, and culture across Europe. Under King Gustav III, Swedish nobles and the royal court eagerly adopted French manners, art, and vocabulary. Later, French military ties and the Bernadotte dynasty (which began with a French general becoming Sweden’s king) reinforced the trend.
As a result, French left a lasting mark on Swedish, especially in areas like fashion, furniture, and food. Here are a few delightful examples:
Restaurang (from restaurant)
Portmonnä (from portemonnaie, wallet)
Chaufför (from chauffeur, driver)
Möbel (from meubles, furniture)
Roulad (from roulade, sponge cake roll)
Fåtölj (from fauteuil, armchair)
Byrå (from bureau, office)
Kö (from queue, line — yes, same word as the cue stick in billiards!)
Butik (from boutique, store)
Toalett (from toilette, toilet)
Frisörsalong (from salon de coiffure, via friseur, hair salon)
And then there’s the one that really made me laugh: Affärslunch.
No, it’s not a lunch date for people having a secret relationship. In Swedish, affär comes from the French affaire, meaning “business.” So an affärslunch is simply a business lunch, often a fixed-price midday meal with soup or salad, a main course, and dessert. It may sound romantic, but it’s strictly about networking. Or at least, it’s supposed to be.
So the next time you sit down in a fåtölj or order something à la carte, remember, you’re not just speaking Swedish, French or English. You’re speaking history.
What’s the funniest or most surprising foreign word you’ve seen adopted into your language?
what an interesting post. I love to hear how words have come to be, how they have evolved over time. Thanks for sharing this.
ReplyDeleteA lesson on words and meanings, very interesting. Can you imagine going to a restaurant and ordering cow or pig? However when we eat deer, it's always called deer meat! I remember way back when I first met Rich's quiet, sweet grandfather he would say the blessing at meals then yell - "Mangia e Statti Zitto" (shut up and eat)
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