A French application is not working (12)
I believe the answer is:
unemployment
'working' is the definition.
Although both the answer and definition are singular nouns, I cannot see how one could define the other.
'a french application is not' is the wordplay.
I cannot really see how this works, but
'not' could be 'nt' (synonyms) and 'nt' is present in the answer.
'a french' could be 'une' ('a' in French) and 'une' is present in the answer.
This may be the basis of the clue (or it may be nonsense).
Can you help me to learn more?
(Another definition for unemployment that I've seen is " State of being out of work".)