This is an article about language policy in France.
France has one official language, the French language, and many other regional languages of France (which have no official status), both in the metropolitan territory of continental Europe and in the overseas territories. The 1999 report written for the French government by Bernard Cerquiglini identified 75 languages that would qualify for recognition under the government's proposed ratification of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.
The French government promotes the use of French in the territory of the Republic, in the European Union and globally through institutions like La Francophonie. The perceived threat from anglicisation has prompted efforts to safeguard the position of the French language in France. Critics of this language policy point to the lack of parallel safeguards for the future of France's regional and minority languages.
History
The Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts of 1539 made French the administrative language of the kingdom of France for legal documents and laws.
Académie française
The Académie française was established in 1635 to act as the official authority on the usages, vocabulary, and grammar of the French language, and to publish an official dictionary of the French language . Its recommendations however carry no legal power and are sometimes disregarded even by governmental authorities. In recent years the Académie has tried to prevent the anglicisation of the French language.
French Revolution
Prior to the French Revolution of 1789, French monarchs did not take a strong position on the language spoken by their subjects. However, in sweeping away the old provinces, parlements and laws, the Revolution established a unified system of administration across the state. At first, the revolutionaries declared liberty of language for all citizens of the Republic, but this policy was subsequently abandoned in favour of the imposition of a common language which was to do away with the other languages of France. As a leader of the Revolution summarised it, the various languages of France were only the refuge of traitors, scoundrels, bigots, obscurantists and backward people.
The new ideology was expounded in the Report on the necessity and means to annihilate the patois and to universalise the use of the French language. Its author, Henri Grégoire, deplores that France, the most advanced country in the world with regard to politics, had not progressed beyond the Tower of Babel as far as languages were concerned, and that only 3 of the 25 million inhabitants of France spoke French as their native tongue.
The report resulted the same year in two laws which stated that the only language tolerated in France in public life and in schools would be French. Within two years, the French language had become the symbol of the national unity of the French State. However, the Revolutionaries lacked both time and money to implement a language policy, and it was only towards the end of the 19th century that the French Republic began to implement a determined policy to create a French-speaking France.
Third Republic
In the 1880s, the Third Republic established free compulsory primary education. The only language allowed in primary school was French. All other languages were forbidden, even in the schoolyard, and transgressions were severely punished. In 1925, Anatole de Monzie, Minister of public education, stated that "for the linguistic unity of France, the Breton language must disappear." As a result, the speakers of minority languages began to be ashamed of their own language, and in the 1950s, many families stopped teaching their language to their children and tried to speak only French with them.
Fourth Republic
The 1950s were also the first time the French state recognised the right of the regional languages to exist. A law allowed for the teaching of regional languages in secondary schools, and the policy of repression in the primary schools came to an end. The Breton language began to appear in the media during this time.
Fifth Republic
After the first few minutes in the radio in the 1940s, the French State allowed in 1964 for the first time one and a half minutes of Breton on regional television. But even in 1972 president Georges Pompidou declared that "there is no place for the regional languages and cultures in a France that intends to mark Europe deeply."
The debate about the Council of Europe’s Charter for Regional or Minority Languages
In 1999 the Jospin socialist government decided to sign the Council of Europe’s European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages and tried, without success, to have it ratified. The Constitutional Council of France declared that the implementation of the Charter would be unconstitutional since the Constitution states that the language of the Republic is French.
The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages is a European convention (ETS 148) adopted in 1992 under the auspices of the Council of Europe to protect and promote historical regional and minority languages in Europe, ratified and implemented by 17 States, but not by France (as of 2004)
The charter contains 98 articles of which signatories must adopt a minimum of 35 (France signed 39).
The signing, and the failure to have it ratified, provoked a debate between the people in favour and the people against the charter.
The main argument against was the fear of the break-up of France "one and indivisible" leading to the threat of "babelism", "balkanization" and then ethnic separatism if Charter were to be implemented, and that therefore there should be only one language recognised in the French state: the French language.
As an example of what proponents of ratification considered racist and scornful, here is a sample quote from an article in Charlie Hebdo , a well-known satirical journal:
- The aborigines are going to be able to speak their patois, oh sorry, their language, without being laughed at. And even keep their accent, that is their beret and their clogs
Likewise, Jacques Chirac, when putting an end to the debate, and justifying why France could not ratify the Charter, said that it would threaten "the indivisibility of the Republic," "equality in front of the Law" and "the unity of the French people," since it may end by conferring "special rights to organised linguistic communities."
Similarly, France, Andorra and Turkey are the only European countries that have not yet signed the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities . This framework entered into force in 1998 and is now nearly compulsory to implement in order to be accepted in the European Union .
Endangered languages
Excluding the languages spoken in the régions d'outre-mer and other overseas territories, and the languages of recent immigrants, the following languages are spoken by sizeable minorities in France:
The non-French Oïl languages and Franco-provençal are highly endangered. The other languages are still spoken but are all considered endangered.
In the 1950s, more than one million people spoke Breton as their main language. The countryside in western Brittany was still overwhelmingly Breton speaking. Today, about 250,000 people are able to speak Breton (1 out of 6 people in the Breton speaking area ); but most of them are old people, over 60 years old. The other languages have followed the same trend, even though Alsatian and Corsican have resisted better, and Occitan as followed still a worse trend.
Accurate information on the state of language use is complicated by the non-recognition of regional languages and the inability of the state to ask language use questions in the census.
Since the rejection of ratification of the European Charter, French governments have offered token support to regional languages within the limits of the law. The Délégation générale à la langue française has acquired the additional function of observing and studying the languages of France and has had "et aux langues de France" added to its title.
The French government hosted the first Assises nationales des langues de France in 2003, but this national round table on the languages of France served to highlight the contrast between cultural organisations and language activists on the one hand and the state on the other.
The decentralisation programme initiated by the Jean-Pierre Raffarin government has not extended to giving power in language policy to the regions.
Opposition to the language policy
France presents itself as a small country struggling for cultural diversity against the predominance of English in international affairs, and regularly sides with minorities in other countries. On the other hand, inside its frontiers, France has been struggling for two hundred years against cultural and linguistic diversity, denying the very existence of minorities. According to French republican ideology (see also Laïcité), all citizens are equal and therefore no groups may exercise extra rights.
This policy has been challenged from both the right wing and the left wing. In the 1970s, nationalist or regionalist movements emerged inregions such as Brittany and Occitania claiming that the people should do what the French State refuses to do. The main result was the creation of associative schools in the minority languages. That new web of schools is called Diwan in Brittany, Ikastola in the Basque country, Calandreta in Occitania, Bressola in Catalunya.
Since then, the popular pressure has legitimised the teaching of minority languages, obliging the French State to open its own bilingual schools in the 1980s. But even today, only one quarter of the young Bretons have access to a course of Breton language during their time in school. The Constitutional Council also blocked the assimilation of the Diwan schools by the state.
A long campaign of defacing road-signs led to the first bilingual road-signs in the 1980s. These are now increasingly common in Brittany. As far as the media are concerned, there is still hardly any Breton on the waves. But since 1982, a few Breton speaking radio stations have been created on an associative basis.
There is some commercial opposition to the policy that restricts the amount of, for example, English in packaging and advertising.
References
- WRIGHT (Sue), 2000, Jacobins, Regionalists and the Council of Europe’s Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, Journal of Multilingual and Multicural Development, vol. 21, n°5, p. 414-424.
- KYMLICKA (Will), Les droits des minorités et le multiculturalisme: l’évolution du débat anglo-américain , in KYMLICKA (Will) et MESURE (Sylvie) dir., Comprendre les identités culturelles, Paris, PUF, Revue de Philosophie et de sciences sociales n°1, 2000, p. 141-171.
- GEMIE, S. (2002), The politics of language : debates and identities in contemporary Brittany, French Cultural Studies n°13, p. 145-164.
- SZULMAJSTER-CELNIKER (Anne), La politique de la langue en France, La Linguistique, vol 32, n°2, 1996, p. 35-63.
See also
External links
- Délégation générale à la langue française et aux langues de France http://www.dglflf.culture.gouv.fr/
- French language documents on French language policy http://www.tlfq.ulaval.ca/axl/europe/france.htm
Last updated: 02-19-2005 02:34:41
Last updated: 05-03-2005 17:50:55
