As a native speaker of a Slavic language who has studied English and currently attempts to learn French I find this entire premise a little baffling.
Typically, a Slavic speaker who has just begun learning English tries to make a linguistic calque and says "I don't see nothing". The teachers would then repeatedly make the point that "there is no double negation in English and you must use 'any' in that case".
Similarly, the use of 'ne' in French is more nuanced. Used alone, it may not convey any negative meaning at all (ne explétif) except when paired with just seven verbs (ne littéraire). I would not therefore call 'ne .. pas' a 'double negative'. A double negative would be "Ce n'est pas rien" which works the same way as 'I do not disagree' in English. This does not reinforce the negative meaning like in Slavic languages but resolves to a positive instead. In addition, in spoken informal French the 'ne' is often dropped and 'pas' is the only indicative of negation (e.g Je sais pas).
The article then goes off on some weird tangent on how patriarchal society feels threatened by the linguistic innovations of the teenage slang. I don't even know.
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As a native speaker of a Slavic language who has studied English and currently attempts to learn French I find this entire premise a little baffling.
Typically, a Slavic speaker who has just begun learning English tries to make a linguistic calque and says "I don't see nothing". The teachers would then repeatedly make the point that "there is no double negation in English and you must use 'any' in that case".
Similarly, the use of 'ne' in French is more nuanced. Used alone, it may not convey any negative meaning at all (ne explétif) except when paired with just seven verbs (ne littéraire). I would not therefore call 'ne .. pas' a 'double negative'. A double negative would be "Ce n'est pas rien" which works the same way as 'I do not disagree' in English. This does not reinforce the negative meaning like in Slavic languages but resolves to a positive instead. In addition, in spoken informal French the 'ne' is often dropped and 'pas' is the only indicative of negation (e.g Je sais pas).
The article then goes off on some weird tangent on how patriarchal society feels threatened by the linguistic innovations of the teenage slang. I don't even know.