Académie Française

   The French Academy is an academy of letters, whose main function is to monitor and prescribe the development of the French language. It was founded in 1635 during the reign of King Louis XIII. It is a self-perpetuating Academy, with forty members, known as "les Imortelles". Academicians are elected for life by the other Academicians. The Acadamy publishes an official dictionary of the French language, but its opinions are not always respected even by the writers of official documents. In recent years, the Academy has been slow to adapt to the changes in the French language resulting from the influence of English and American, and of youth culture in general. It has fought a rearguard but generally unsuccessful action to preserve the French language from contamination by English; some successes have however been marked up, such as the replacement of "une pipeline" by "un oléoduc" (once the main word to describe a pipeline, "pipeline" has virtually disappeared from modern French), or - to a lesser extent - "hit parade", which now coexists with "palmarès".