For some, it recalls the anxiety of the blank page in a school notebook, faced with the eternal questioning of the agreement of the past participle with pronominal verbs. For others, it evokes nostalgia for texts carefully copied with a fountain pen, and the satisfaction of not having made any mistakes in the plural of compound words, silent letters or the use of hyphens. For still others, it awakens memories of entire hours spent with family in front of the television, watching the famous “Dicos d’or”, these French spelling championships organized by Bernard Pivot, whose funeral took place Tuesday May 14 in the village of Quincié-en-Beaujolais, near Lyon.
Long considered too academic, even out of date, dictation fell slightly out of favor in the mid-2000s, after the last final of the “Dicos d’or”. The requirement of this spelling work, whose reputation is maintained by texts such as the famous dictation of Prosper Mérimée in 1857 – requested by Empress Eugénie and in which Napoleon III is said to have made 75 mistakes -, the traditional dictation of certificate of end of studies or the complex statements of Bernard Pivot, no longer seduces. “The arrival of the Internet, text messages with shortened words, Anglo-Saxon abbreviations and emoticons have somewhat made dictation and the love of letters fade into oblivion,” comments writer Rachid Santaki, founder of La Dictée giante, an initiative which has offered free dictation competitions accessible to all throughout France since 2013.
But in recent years, thanks to major popular events and small regional competitions, dictation has experienced a surprising return to favor among the French. Driven by the participation of local or national celebrities in certain competitions and by the broadcast of short addictive videos on social networks, exercise has become fashionable again. “You just have to look at the number of registrations we have, it’s impressive. Attendance at our competitions has almost doubled over the past year,” comments Rachid Santaki. During the last “giant dictation” organized by the novelist at the Evry ice rink (Essonne), on May 8, more than 400 people showed up – compared to an average of “100 to 150 participations usually”, rejoices the organizer. But the writer’s greatest success remains “La Grande dictée des Champs”, organized on June 4 on the Champs-Elysées, in Paris. The event, which broke the world record for the largest dictation ever organized, brought together more than 5,000 participants – for 50,000 initial applications. “Seeing videos of the event get more than a million views on the networks, my children said to me: ‘Dad, you’ve made it’”, laughs Rachid Santaki again.
Brigitte Macron and Thomas Pesquet
This is not the man’s first attempt. In 2018, he organized a giant dictation at the Stade de France, bringing together nearly 1,500 participants. Same success in 2021, when astronaut Thomas Pesquet was hired as an exceptional reader during a dictation at the Air and Space Museum at Le Bourget, for a text read… from the International Space Station. Never noted, always corrected directly with the participants and often widely reproduced on social networks, these dictations have, according to Rachid Santaki, made it possible to “bring the exercise up to date”, and to “make the idea of reading accessible and to write to as many people as possible. Abdellah Boudour, founder of the “Dictation for All” competitions, agrees. “Between those nostalgic for the school dictation of the 1960s, those who want to find a family outing, competitors who want to learn new words and real spelling enthusiasts, there is something for everyone,” comments this native of ‘Argenteuil (Val-d’Oise), which has been organizing dictation competitions throughout the country for more than ten years.
In 2013, at the request of mothers in his neighborhood, the man organized his first dictations, which met with unexpected enthusiasm. Month after month, he organizes competitions in remand centers, hospitals, schools or the northern districts of Marseille… until pushing open the doors of the Élysée Palace in 2019 with a text dictated by Brigitte Macron, and those of the Palace of Versailles, the same year, with a dictation read by the comedian Gad Elmaleh. “It worked so well that we ended up delegating the concept to several local associations, which organize regional competitions, often in the neighborhoods. Through these playful dictations, many people who had not met before mix. And above all , many are rediscovering the taste for spelling, the desire to surpass themselves”, says the founder of La Dictée pour tous, which has brought together “more than 90,000 participants” over the past ten years. Yacine, attracted by French and reading since middle school, passed on the pleasure of words to his children by participating in Abdellah Boudour’s dictations. “It shows them that work pays off, on the one hand. And above all, it motivates them: my youngest was rather mathematical, but he started to appreciate dictations through competition, by wanting to beat his brothers. Now , he loves spelling”, testifies this father, originally from the Paris region.
Influencers and online dictations
On social networks, the number of subscribers of certain accounts specialized in spelling practice confirms this enthusiasm among the French. The colorful posts of the influencer “Maîtresse Adeline”, followed by more than 2.2 million people on Instagram, are a hit: 165,000 “likes” for a video on the spelling of the word “round trip”, 122,000 for an explanation on the agreement of compound color adjectives, 55,000 for clarification on the difference between the words “When” and “Quant”… Doubled by real success on YouTube, where his 97,000 subscribers delight in his dictations for adults stated and corrected online. “We are adapting to today’s world: dictation sessions on the Internet are now in high demand,” comments Philippe Dessouliers, founder of the “Belf”ortho” spelling club, based in Belfort (Franche-Comté).
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, this traditional spelling club, which brings together around forty followers each week for face-to-face dictation, has offered online dictations accessible to all its members around the world. For the modest sum of ten euros per year, any Internet user can follow, every Tuesday evening, a live exercise on the Internet. “The number of our subscribers has more than doubled: there are now more than 80 of us, and we even have a member based in Quebec!” laughs Philippe Dessouliers. Among these spelling addicts, the enthusiast counts “many retirees and former teachers”, but also “thirty-year-olds, a former police officer, engineers or former nurses”. Everyone meets regularly “in physics”, on the field, during interregional or national championships.
The founder of Belf’ortho himself admits “not to hesitate” to cross France to take part in national competitions, even if it means driving several hours from Belfort, to join an event in Saint-Étienne or Sète. “We often find the same faces there, but there are also more and more young people, profiles that we didn’t necessarily see before,” estimates Belfortain, also an author of dictations. His collections, sold to the most interested, are also a hit, with more than 7,000 sales for his first work. Enough to ensure the succession of the famous dictations of Bernard Pivot who, according to this connoisseur, will always remain “the first to have made dictation fun for the French”.
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