Does French Know Ball?

By Quan | 15 September 2026 | 12 min read

Knowing a Field is One Thing. Playing in it is Another.

This past weekend I drove to Austin to meet up with friends for the football game between Texas and Ohio State. In the group chat I shared a reel from comedian Dan Yang (warning, NSFW) posing the question, "Can you really know ball?" He shares how if you want to make a football fan upset you just accuse them of "not knowing ball," adding he'd rather be called a racial slur than be accused of that. It became a little running joke with the group for the rest of the weekend. "Do you know ball?"

[NSFW] Can you even truly "know ball?" from Dan Yang @realdanyang

Growing up in Houston I played football in high school and have spent countless hours playing it online via Madden or NCAA Football. At one point, I was in the top 200 rankings online for the college game, so I felt like someone who knew ball. That's usually until I played someone who would beat me so bad it left me thinking, "Do I really know ball?"

This is sort of what it feels like when you're at A1 in French and flying high with the passé composé and the imparfait until you get shot down in May with the subjonctif. What do you mean espérer doesn't trigger it? How is that not a mood?

Football for the most part looks rather simple, it's just a bunch of dudes running from one end to another. The reality is it's 4D chess with traps being laid out all over the place in broad daylight, ready to ensnare you at any moment. As physical as it is, it's the subtleties within the context of situations that separate the great teams from good. Like most things in life.

Do you know French?

Dan's reel made me think back to a few months ago. I read a Reddit post where the OP (original poster) shared how they passed their C1 DALF exam, a huge accomplishment. Essentially, it's a level that opens a lot of doors in the French speaking world.

The interesting part was reading through their journey and other people's comments. It took them five to six years to reach a B2 level because they worked full-time and took night classes. Yet they still had doubts and struggles. C2 is the final level offered in French and they questioned whether they would ever be a native speaker even achieving that.

The suggestions offered ranged from pursuing it to not, but it was framed around the context of their situation, was it for school, work, or for personal satisfaction?

Essentially, who decides that you are fluent? A passing C2 score? The natives? You?

Moving the Goalposts

The Texas - Ohio State game ended in dramatic fashion with Texas storming back for a one point win at the end. I've had season tickets with my friends for nearly thirty years at this point, so I've seen my fair share of games. It was easily one of the top two or three games I've witnessed at DKR Royal Memorial Stadium.

No hat nor cattle from Bo

Yet another moment online hijacked the improbable comeback. A Texas politician who is running for Railroad Commissioner, Bo French, cherry picked a freeze frame from a video that the University of Texas had posted of students celebrating the final touchdown. There were several students of seemingly South Asian descent in it. He captioned it by saying, "I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn't believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined."

The next day, Texas became the number one ranked football team in the polls. And Bo's post became a lightning rod for reactions. It isn't his first nor even his worst take if you're familiar with him (spin the wheel and he's probably talked about your group), but the game's magnitude (possibly the most viewed regular season college game this week) and the algorithms lifted this post out of his usual quagmire. And everything from the issue of assimilation, to belonging, and even admission standards to the school have been discussed. But mainly for me, many of my friends come from this community and are part of our group of season ticket holders. This is our crew and we bleed burnt orange so to speak.

I'm also a product of the University's admission process, which guarantees admission for those who are in the top five percent of their high school classes. During my time it was the top ten percent. I took French at the Six Pack at UT for several semesters. Although I was a pretty mediocre French student, it planted a lot of the seeds for my return to learning the language a generation later.

The University of Texas is a place where a lot of immigrants and second generation students discover and fall in love with one of the biggest parts of the culture there, which is football. I took my friends from New York once to a game and they jokingly remarked to me that this was church for us. A congregation of 100,000.

Even then, whenever situations arise like this, it's always interesting to read the field and see how goalposts move. It made me think about France.

A Similar Game with Different Rules

As people started finding the students to get their story from the game, others were analyzing numbers and making arguments for meritocracy or creating various think pieces about the issue. I thought about how impossible this type of analysis would be in France because it is illegal to collect data based on race.

Race doesn't exist there as a concept. They banned the collection of this type of data in 1978 and wrote the word race out of the constitution in 2018. It's basically illegal to do any kind of research using race, so the data is pretty much nonexistent there.

It of course doesn't mean issues don't occur. There were huge protests over the death of Nahel M by the police in the suburb of Nanterre in the summer of 2023. It's an area I got familiar with, having stayed there the following summer for the Olympics, right next to Rueil-Malmaison. The linguistic gymnastics they have to use to talk about the matter is another issue.

French politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon insulting the accent of journalist Véronique Gaurel

But I thought of another story from years ago when I was starting to learn French again. In 2018, French politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon insulted a journalist, Véronique Gaurel, because of her accent. She is from Toulouse and was pressing him on corruption issues only for him to weasel his way out with an ad hominem attack on how she spoke, asking if someone else there could speak French because he brushed hers aside.

In 2020, President Macron appointed Jean Castex as the Prime Minister. The Parisians lost their minds over his Southern accent as he hails from the southwest, from Gers, and is fluent in Catalan. Castex is a defender of the heritage. The accent to the Parisians are akin to listening to hillbillies.

One of the reasons I chose to study in Tours during my immersion course was because the area (Loire Valley) was heralded as the purest French in the country (from past history with the monarchy). The accent there is pretty neutral. This was some advice I got from my professor at the time in Dallas.

While I understood my professors in Tours pretty well, it was the other students from other countries that really threw me for a loop. Hearing an Italian speak it with a sing-songy cadence, or an Irishman who I had trouble understanding in English was such a trip. I was used to the typical American accent, but this was the real world and I had to make adjustments.

There are more people outside of France that speak French than those in the country itself. We would listen to audio in class of people from various parts of Africa, Canada, the Caribbean, and the Outre-mer. At times it was much harder to decipher a foreign language on top of another accent.

Even in Vietnamese, my family's mother tongue, I have issues. On one occasion while grabbing a bowl of pho near the Sorbonne in Paris, the owner (Chinese) came over to figure out if I was Vietnamese, asking in Mandarin before French. I said yes in French. One of his regulars was there, an older Vietnamese man in his 90s, and he wanted to introduce him.

fc2612_post-long-tail-french-ball-story-01

fc2612_post-long-tail-french-ball-story-02

fc2612_post-long-tail-french-ball-story-03

The older gentleman came over and we started our conversation in Vietnamese, but his northern Vietnamese accent was so thick I couldn't track him. So I then politely asked to switch to French to understand what was going on. Now I found myself having to decipher his French with a thick Northern Vietnamese accent.

I basically do-si-do'd between the two languages and managed to wing it. He had never met a Vietnamese person who lived in Texas so was having fun asking about how life was across the pond, curious if there was Vietnamese food there. I should have mentioned to him that Vietnamese was the third most spoken language in Texas, albeit, it's a huge drop off from Spanish. He gave me a dap with our fists to end the conversation. The dapper Parisian left with his jacket, coat, and scarf leaving quite an impression on me.

fc2612_post-long-tail-french-ball-story-04

fc2612_post-long-tail-french-ball-story-05

fc2612_post-long-tail-french-ball-story-06

Glottophobia

The incident with Véronique Gaurel, who is from the Occitan area, coincided with what is now a law to protect people from discrimination against accents, a term called glottophobia. It was coined by a sociologist in Rennes named Philippe Blanchet. It’s now known as the Law to Promote the France of Accents. You can actually go to jail (3 years) and pay a hefty fine (over $50k) breaking the law, but proving it is another matter.

Personally, I found it easier to understand people in the south, mainly because they spoke like they weren’t in a hurry. Maybe it's the southerner in me.

But it was pretty interesting reading about how many people in France felt discriminated against because of their accents. One of the fascinating aspects of its history is how many different languages there were (Occitan, Breton, Basque, and Alsatian) before the country's language reforms (1880s Jules Ferry laws) punished speakers of those languages in order to unify the nation to one language, French. I recalled listening to Duolingo’s French Podcast (Episode 60) about a woman trying to save the Breton language from extinction.

In essence, the continued education reforms of the late 19th century were then carried over to Indochina, and its model was what my own grandparents in Mo Cay learned under, as well as my mother and her siblings in Saigon (Cochinchina).

American Tongues

In recent times, many actors and performers in France go to speech therapists to overcome their own accents to compete in the marketplace which desires neutral accents. In college, I took a speech-language pathology course as an elective and watched the documentary, American Tongues.

It seemed almost like a relic of time, hearing accents from the west coast to the east that varied in every way possible. At certain times we’d laugh out loud at certain accents, usually people from the Northeast. A few women from that area talked about wanting to do well and advance in their careers, but faced discrimination over how people perceived their accents. So they had to work on changing it. You could feel why they felt discriminated against by the way they talked. We had just done it ourselves with the echoes lingering in the large auditorium.

E pluribus unum

These days accents feel much more homogenized with modern media. Even when I listen to French or try to practice, I’m taking my cues from someone who usually speaks a very neutral accent. In other instances, it's controlled by the powers that be, casting directors and such. And in some ways, I wonder what will be lost as time goes on if everyone sounds the same.

I've lost count of how many times people who find out I'm from Texas will tell me how I don't have any accent, as though it were a disappointment. On the flip side in France, I had several people give me a look of, wait, you're an American? after small talk. One guy even jokingly sequestered me, "You shouldn't be able to talk like that. How did you learn your French accent?" Meanwhile my Vietnamese gets laughs at times. People will say I sound like a Viet Kieu. It's a term to describe someone from the diaspora, a sojourner who left and is elsewhere.

A person who is from a place but is now an outsider.

Post Game Analysis from River Oaks Problems

But what does it mean for assimilation and feeling like you belong in a society? Even if you sound like everyone or dress like everyone or are a second or third generation citizen supporting the local sports club like a diehard, does an ad hominem attack take that away unfairly? Does erasure of words to codify humanity help or strip? Do laws trying to prevent discrimination actually do so in practice?

Does having a team to root for together help? Or isn’t that just another form of everything else? Would the goalposts just move?

Or what if these things meant to help were weaponized in return? What is it that we are trying to build? What of the heart?

Later on during the day after the game, I saw this post by River Oaks Problems, a sharp parody account I follow from Houston (the satirical name comes from the wealthiest, old money neighborhood in Houston) lambasting Bo French. I sent it to the same group of friends I sent the Dan Yang post. Coincidentally, some of them grew up in Arlington and Sugar Land as well. There were lots of laughing emojis over it.

As for continuing to slowly learn French, the responses to Dan Yang’s post took a Socratic turn on one thread, which reflected my ongoing thoughts on learning the language.

Commenter 1: But the more I know ball is the more I know I don’t know ball
Commenter 2 reply: This is the eternal conundrum
Commenter 3 reply: This is the way.
The only thing any of us can ever truly know is that we don’t know ball. There can never be a total, comprehensive knowledge of ball. It is folly to assume total ball knowledge can ever be attained.
It is the eternal pursuit of ball knowledge across time, even in the discomfort of knowing that we will never fully capture it, that binds us all.

In some ways that’s everything essentially in life. You come across this when trying to build a winning football team, a family, a community, a society, a nation. The discomfort in knowing you may never fully capture it all, yet, you keep going.

As for America, will it resemble more of a gumbo or perhaps the grafted 40 Fruit Tree? They’re hard questions for lofty ambitions. And in one form or another, we are all bound together for better or for worse.

Now whether Bo French knows ball is another matter.