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France rogue state on regional languages? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5335 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 9 of 22 06 April 2012 at 10:37am | IP Logged | |||||
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That depends how you define politics... However this is linguistic politics, So I can hardly think of any forum
which would be more appropriate for this discussion. I think most countries have their skeletons in the closet when it comes to minority politics. I know we have. The Saami children were punished for speaking their language in school. We have however mended our ways, and it is now actively encouraged. Languages do not normally fall in disuse because the speakers find it uncool, but because of outside forces. I would be extremely surprised if France was the one exception. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| COF Senior Member United States Joined 5832 days ago 262 posts - 354 votes Speaks: English* | Message 10 of 22 06 April 2012 at 3:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The differences between France and the UK in terms of linguistic preservation are indeed very striking.
France gives no official status to any other language than French, whereas in the UK, as far as I'm aware it is possible to actually correspond with government departments in Welsh, Scottish Gaelic and Irish Gaelic on an equal basis with the English language. Also, I have heard that in Wales particularly, the ability to speak Welsh is a significant advantage when applying for jobs, particularly in the public sector and on that level learning Welsh is almost encouraged as a means of advancing ones job prospects. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Icaria909 Senior Member United States Joined 5592 days ago 201 posts - 346 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 11 of 22 06 April 2012 at 5:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
I recently read a great book called the Story of French by Jean-Benoit Nadeau and Julie Barlow. It was an absolutely fascinating read and I would highly recommend it to anyone on this forum. If I remember correctly, according to the book, only 10% of the population at the time of the revolution spoke "French (don't have the book at the moment to verify the exact statistic)." It was usually merchants, the people around Paris, and the Elite who spoke French. Most people at the time didn't travel much within France because of internal tariffs and other impediments to travel and migration and so they didn't usually need to know much Standard French. However, the Revolution would dislocate entire communities and the sense of nationalism it inspired really provided the impetus for the French people to learn standard French. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5131 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 12 of 22 06 April 2012 at 6:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm always suspicious of these numbers. Last week, in my boredom of all things April Fool's, I went looking for information and resources about Piemontese. Ehtnologue puts the number at a little over 3 million speakers, which I find sort of hard to believe. While I heard a decent amount of it when I visited the Italian Alps, my exposure wasn't enough to make me think there were that many speakers. R. == 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4669 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 13 of 22 06 April 2012 at 6:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
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A scandal in Spain:
Galician, a ''village dialect'' http://www.publico.es/129398/el-gallego-un-dialecto-que-habl an-ustedes-en-su-aldea Even though Galician, Basque and Catalan are recognized in Spain, they are discriminated against. You don't see them on the Spanish passport, unlike Canadian/Belgian/Swiss passports which use all official languages of the state. Even the American passport is bilingual (English+Spanish), but Basque, Galician and Catalan don't appear in Spanish documents. Edited by Medulin on 06 April 2012 at 6:34pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4679 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 14 of 22 06 April 2012 at 6:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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For anyone who can read French, I suggest reading this website:
http://www.tlfq.ulaval.ca/axl/francophonie/HIST_FR_s5_Renais sance.htm From chapter 5 to 7 should be the period of interest for the current topic, but going back to the chapter 1 to get to the roots of French (i.e. emergence from the Roman empire's Latin). The difference between the UK and France is quite obvious: most of the minority languages of France (if we take the main ones mentioned earlier) belong to the Romance family and are very close to French, with a good mutual intelligility. In that context, it's quite natural that they've been considered as "not speaking properly". I'm not sure the UK has protection of the varieties of English spoken in Northern England, for instance. The languages protected in the UK are merely Celtic languages which cannot be considered to be "improper English". Sure, France has Breton, which is the exception to what I've just said. The situation is also very different from the Native American languages. And as everybody tends to agree that we must protect minority languages, I suppose I can play the devil's advocate. I mentioned Arabic in a rhetorical question... the answer is obvious, "because Arabic doesn't belong to our ancestral culture". Well, to whose ancestral culture? For most of the French, Breton is not part of their ancestral culture, and for many of them, Arabic is. Then, protecting languages costs quite a lot of money, and people are usually than inclined to contribute financially through their tax to protect a language they don't actually care about than simply signing a petition for it. Saami was mentioned for Norway, but it's also easier to protect "1" language. The article mentioned has 10 languages, a good half of which exist only in France. That's not the same kind of effort. So again, I believe it is nice to protect languages, but I don't think it will happen in France, for the reasons mentioned above. Not that I don't regret it. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| HenryMW Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5175 days ago 125 posts - 179 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, French Studies: Modern Hebrew | Message 15 of 22 06 April 2012 at 8:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
Mine has French on it, too. I think that has less to do with respect for regional languages than the fact that those languages are spoken in our immediate neighbors. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 16 of 22 06 April 2012 at 8:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
See this post on why "Saami" is more accurately described as 9 languages rather 1 as implied by using just "Saami". Despite current efforts to nurture the Saamic languages, it's by necessity governed by financial constraints and uneveness in the size of the Saamic speech communities. This post above also includes a little information near the end about Saami imperfectly reacquiring their linguistic heritage (at least initially) as Northern Saami has the highest support of all of the Saamic languages. As much as I support language preservation generally, I don't believe in it when the affected speech community and the external support groups (either from the government or NGOs) are effectively negating or diluting each other's efforts. See this thread where instruction in Komi and Russian is mandatory in Russia's semi-autonomous Komi Republic despite the dubious results of the policy among the Komis and Russians alike. Basically, if you can't do it right and get enough effective support from everyone involved, then don't bother. Regarding this thread, I can get both vermillon's points as well as the seeming oddity of "liberal" France (being part of the "enlightened" EU and such) not actually supporting much minority languages because of the constitutional clause drawn on Herderian thought that was all the rage in the late "Age of Enlightenment" and the nationalist fever of the 19th century. FYI: J.G. Herder stated (in translation): "Is a people... more fond of anything than the language of its fathers? Its complete wealth of views on tradition, history, religion, and principles of life reside in language, all of the people's heart and soul" and this easily led to thinking (a fallacy, in my judgement) that "the X nation/people can speak only the X language" with X being the ethnic/national adjective of your imagination. Somehow the ethnic group's/nation's uniqueness/"essence" is inadmissible when it speaks natively a language that is used natively by another ethnic group/nation. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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