Alcoholism is an almost universal problem which varies in nature and extent from culture to culture. To discriminate between French and American students on the basis of measured attitudes toward alcohol, American college students (N=291) and French college students (N=308) completed attitude measures for alcohol derived from a 14 scale semantic differential. The scales contained adjective pairs representative of evaluative (e.g., pleasant-painful), potency (e.g., strong-weak), and activity (e.g., complex-simple) dimensions. Analyses of results showed that the nationality of 79 percent of all students was correctly assigned by variable-profile analysis. The sociable-unsociable scale made the greatest contribution to overall discrimination, followed by the serious-humorous pairs. French students rated alcohol as more pleasant, more humorous, more gentle, and less passive than their American counterparts. Americans rated alcohol as sociable, while the French rated it as neutral, suggesting possible cultural differences in alcohol function for the two populations. (WAS)