Why French people say next Friday and we say this Friday...

If a native French speaker tells their English colleague “on se voit mercredi prochain” on a Monday, they probably mean in two days’ time – while the colleague may assume they mean in nine.

One or both of them is going to be either early, late and, more than likely, confused.

The culprit is the word prochain – ‘next’ – when it is attached to a day of the week.

A French speaker saying mercredi prochain on a Monday typically means the very next Wednesday, in two days' time.

An English speaker hearing ‘next Wednesday’ will usually assume the Wednesday of the following week.

In English, ‘next’ tends to attach to ‘next week’; in French, it tends to attach to the ‘next’ occurrence of the thing itself, whichever week that falls in. The same mismatch crops up with le week-end prochain (next weekend), and with months too.

Lyon's public library fields exactly this kind of question through its reference service, Guichet du Savoir, where a reader once asked what je vais à la piscine mercredi prochain actually means.

The answer draws on Le Grand Robert de la langue française, which is unequivocal: with regard to dates, prochain means "the one that follows immediately, the first one starting from today."

Dictionaries take a firm line, however native speakers are less sure.

A long-running thread on the language forum WordReference shows how much disagreement there is among francophones themselves.

Several contributors agree with the dictionary. Others do not.

Terio, from Quebec, says that if he hears mercredi prochain, he assumes it means the Wednesday of the following week – for which Gérard Lapalinex, from Lyon, accuses him of "falling victim to this rampant anglicism," asking wistfully: "Who, apart from me, still refers to the three Thursdays to come as jeudi prochain, jeudi en huit and jeudi en quinze?"

Several useful patterns emerge from the debate.

Distance from the day in question matters. If it is Wednesday and someone says lundi prochain, the nearest Monday is the natural reading. If it is Sunday and someone says lundi prochain, people are more likely to assume it means the Monday eight days off – on the logic that if they had meant tomorrow, they would simply have said demain.

In practice, native speakers often just avoid prochain altogether.

As one WordReference contributor, Chimel, points out, ordinary spoken French often avoids the ambiguity with alternatives: on se voit samedi?, ce samedi, samedi qui vient – or, for very near dates, demain or après-demain.

On Connexion’s Facebook page, Karen Lehmeier says she has heard many French speakers “making sure” by instead giving the date, such as on se voit le 7 (see you on the seventh).

There is also samedi en huit, the traditional unambiguous way of naming the Saturday after the immediately forthcoming one – though one Parisian contributor suspects younger speakers use it less.

It is worth noting, however, that English speakers are not all in agreement either.

English also has its own version of samedi en huit: British usage has historically offered ‘Wednesday week’ or ‘Wednesday next’ as ways of pinning down the Wednesday of the following week. Like samedi en huit, however, these constructions are more likely to be heard from older speakers.

On Facebook, Steven Abram notes that in English saying ‘this’ removes ambiguity (eg. ‘this Wednesday’) once the week has started.

So, it is not solely a French-English translation issue: it is an ambiguity in the way people talk about time that exists in both languages – and both have a similar fix for it.

When precision matters, you can drop ‘next’ altogether and just name the day, or spell out the interval: On se voit samedi. See you Saturday.