#RIP the hashtag. It had a good run, August 2007 - January 2013. At least it's still alive and respected in every other country apart from France.
It's a dark day for the Gallic Internet, as the French Government drive to preserve their language by altering the settled will of the online community. The hashtag will no longer be used in official communications or papers. The replacement term will be mot-dièse.
mot-dièse, n.m.
Définition : Suite signifiante de caractères sans espace commençant par le signe # (dièse), qui signale un sujet d'intérêt et est insérée dans un message par son rédacteur afin d'en faciliter le repérage.
Domaine : Télécommunications-Informatique/Internet.
Really? I know the French are trying to preserve their language, but the hashtag is the wrong target. Not just because of the international nature of Twitter, but also the nature of how the hashtag was arrived at.
Much of the language of Twitter was built up by the first wave of users, with many ideas being tried by individuals, the good ones being picked up by their circle of friends, and the really good ones jumping out to be de facto standards - that were then baked back into the ecosystem as they were codifed by the Twitter developers.
The careful scholar will note that much of the early terminology and soon to be standards were built on principles from IRC chat rooms, so it's not a case of creating, but recreating for a different platform.
That's not what the French government have done. They've decided that a term built up and adopted by a community is not good enough for them because it uses an english word. No matter that languages evolve in the same way as commands and symbols on Twitter, no matter that everyone has already decided it is a hashtag, and no matter that everyone is pointing and laughing at this idea.... I doubt a committee sitting in Paris are going to be able to change what the entire population of France will think when they see the symbol, let alone the rest of the internet.
Will they think 'mot-dièse,'? No. They'll think that the government should be focusing on more important issues, such as the troubles in mali, the ongoing economic issues in Europe, political issues in the EU... and they'll think #fail.
