Why do I need to know Tanguy?

It’s a pop-culture reference to grown-up children who still live in the family home.

What does it mean?

Tanguy – pronounced ton-gee – is, in reality, a boy’s name. But, following the success of the 2001 film Tanguy, it has been co-opted to describe grown-up children who are slow to leave the family home, and the growing frustration of their parents.

In the film, the eponymous well-educated and working 28-year-old insists on staying in the family home, despite having the financial wherewithal to move out, to the dismay and increasing annoyance of his parents – with his mother desperately hiding murderous thoughts towards her child.

The film gave rise to the term phénomène Tanguy (Tanguy phenomenon), and to an expression to describe the age group of these young people: la génération Tanguy (Tanguy generation).

In 2019, a sequel, Tanguy, Le Retour, revisited the family home – as the title character returns home 16 years later with his daughter, after his wife leaves him.

Use it like this

Mon fils est un Tanguy: il a 28 ans ans, est célibataire et vit toujours chez moi –  My son is a Tanguy: he is 28, single and still lives at my house.