Five Hillsdale College students traveled to Tours, France, this spring and summer to study at the Institut de Touraine, where they lived with host families and took intensive French language courses while exploring the region’s historic sites.

The French government has been dictating what counts as the proper French language for almost 400 years now (save for a nasty little break during the French Revolution), but while it may have picked fights with words like “software” and “hashtag ...