THE baccalauréat exam season approaches, and with it ritual agonising over the standard of French spelling. These days, fingers are pointed not only at progressive teaching, the decline of the dictée or the legacy of May 1968. The new culprit is text-messaging.

“Look at what text-messaging is doing to the French language,” lamented President Nicolas Sarkozy in February. “If we let things go, in a few years we will have trouble understanding each other.” Most secondary-school pupils have their own mobile telephones, and they use an abbreviated phonetic language to communicate. A2M1, for instance, means à demain, or “see you tomorrow”. JTM is je t'aime (I love you). Or try: Ta HT 1 KDO? (T'as acheté un cadeau?, or have you bought a present?).

Text-messaging corrupts all languages. But the French are touchy because theirs is so much an emblem of national identity. It is hard enough to protect French from the invasion of English; now self-destruction threatens. The use of English is tightly restricted in advertising or on the radio, and all English-language slogans must by law be accompanied by a French translation. So Nespresso's ad starring George Clooney, with the catchline “What else?”, has “Quoi d'autre?” as a subtitle.

There are no such restrictions on text-messaging, for now. Yet it is creeping into the marketing toolbox. C CHIC, a play both on C'est chic (It's chic) and the C series cars, is the name of Citroën's exhibition on the Champs Elysées in Paris. Or take an ad designed to attract 18-29-year-olds by BNP Paribas, a bank, which has the slogan: TA + K ENTRER (T'as plus qu'entrer, or you only have to come in). “It is designed to break the idea that the bank is austere and closed for the young,” explains BNP Paribas. “So it's logical to use text-messaging language.”

Some see this as a slippery slope down which “efficiency seems to authorise all imaginable offences against our dear language,” as one educationalist grumbles. Others see it as no more menacing than shorthand for telegrams or typing. Whether schoolchildren can distinguish between useful shorthand in the playground and correct spelling in an exam remains to be seen—or, rather, is a question for 2M1.