About the Film

The Multilingual Pleasures of English is a short film I made with Professor Richard Scholar, a writer, translator and academic at Durham University, for IMEMS. It draws on his book Emigres: French Words That Turned English, published by Princeton University Press, and looks at the hidden stories behind French words that have quietly become part of everyday English.

This academic film collaboration was filmed in my studio in Newcastle, working from a thoughtful, lyrical script full of small observations about power, culture and the long history of linguistic exchange between English and French.

Words That Turned English

Richard’s book traces how English has always been shaped by what it borrows, especially from French. Some words, like restaurant or ballet, are so fully absorbed that we forget they were ever foreign. Others, like je ne sais quoi, a la mode or raison d’etre, keep a performative Frenchness that signals sophistication or irony, while also hinting at colonial history and a longer negotiation of identity.

In the film, Richard speaks about words such as caprice, naivete and ennui as cultural artefacts in their own right, carrying emotional weight that is difficult to translate. He points to a character like Del Boy in Only Fools and Horses reaching for these words for comic effect, but also for something aspirational: a stylish, improvised cosmopolitanism. These are the moments when English shows its porousness, open to other languages even as it half resists them.

Borrowed Words, Layered Meanings

A single word can hold several lives depending on where and when it travels. Richard explains how a la mode once referred to fashionable black silk in seventeenth century Britain, while in North America today the same phrase simply means served with ice cream. The film touches on creolisation, a concept shaped by thinkers such as Edouard Glissant and Stuart Hall, and Richard’s argument that English, as a global language, has been formed by a creolising process bound up with unequal relations of power, not least colonialism. Many of the French words that have turned English carry traces of that entangled history.

Richard also draws on the work of Raymond Williams, who catalogued the keywords of English cultural life, to suggest there is a missing category in that catalogue: words of conspicuously foreign origin. These emigre words give English speakers new expressive room, a kind of elegant distance or layered irony that native equivalents do not always offer.

Filming an Academic Film Collaboration in the Studio

As a documentary filmmaker, I am drawn to projects that sit at the edge of disciplines, where language meets identity and where research can be made accessible without being flattened. This academic film collaboration was filmed in a quiet, controlled studio space, which let us focus fully on the tone and pacing of Richard’s script. The setup was minimal: enough lighting to shape the image, a fixed camera to let the voice carry the film, and a few carefully placed graphical flourishes referencing the visual emblems Princeton University Press designed for each word in the book.

A New Idea for the New Normal

The film was made for a series exploring new ideas for the new normal, produced in the wake of the pandemic and Brexit, when questions about Britain’s relationship with other languages and cultures felt especially live. Richard’s argument runs through the script like a quiet refrain: that English is a multilingual language, and that recognising this is a way of meeting other cultures with curiosity rather than suspicion. Working on this academic film collaboration was a reminder that words are never just tools for communication. They are windows into the histories and values that shape us, and the ones we borrow are often doing more work than the ones we already own.