Once again, France is attempting to draw a line in the sand against the encroaching tide of English. This time, reportedly, the language police are focusing on business and computer-related vocabulary. Marketplace and cyberspace must now be conceived of en francais, thank you, even if that means talking about a jeune pousse (a young sprout) instead of a startup, or an ordinateur rather than a computer, as the French have unpatriotically been doing. The French Finance Ministry's "economic terminology commission" has drawn up a list of acceptable French alternatives for common English terms in both fields, to be imposed forthwith on government employees and strongly recommended to the public. Aux armes, citoyens! The tyranny of English must be resisted.

One can sympathize with the French. At one time, theirs was the first language of diplomacy, culture and cuisine -- an indispensable part of a well-rounded education. "Speak in French when you can't think of the English for a thing," the Red Queen advised Alice in "Through the Looking Glass" (1872). Seventy-five years later, responding to a proposal to simplify English spelling, George Orwell mused that were it not for its difficulty English would be well fitted to become "the universal second language, if there ever is such a thing." The language standing in its way, of course, was French, which even as late as Orwell's time really was near-universal among the people who ran things, as we are reminded in small ways every day. French is still there in our passports, telling the world our nom and our place de naissance. It clutters up our post-office forms, asking us if our package is a cadeau and if so, what is its valeur? It makes us say "cuisine" when we actually mean plain old cooking. And, as France likes to point out, French is still an official language in 50 countries.

But these are remnants of past glory. Since the end of World War II, which sealed the political and economic ascendancy of the United States, English -- or, more accurately, Anglo-American -- has surged past French as the global lingua franca. Orwell's prophecy has been fulfilled with a vengeance, even without simplified spelling. Further, as the French government's latest salvo attests, the dominance of English has only been magnified by more recent developments. The rise of the Internet, an American invention, has taken English out of the geographic realm and made it the language of that ethereal wraparound we call cyberspace. To the extent that the globalization of commerce is a computer-based phenomenon, it, too, depends on English. For entirely practical reasons, the global village cannot also be the tower of Babel.