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French diglossia- thoughts for discussion | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4907 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 1 of 38 31 March 2015 at 12:23pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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The subject of French diglossia was mentioned on another thread, and I'd like to explore it a bit further. I didn't want to hijack the original thread, so I'm starting a new and specific discussion. I hope this will be a useful and interesting discussion.
First, the original comment by kanewai about diglossia:
Then part of a post from eyðimörk:
Finally a brief comment from the beginning of a post by Cavesa:
I also thought that kanewai's comments were exaggerated, but I didn't want to derail the thread. Here are my responses to kanewai's three specific examples: Il marche pas. (The 'ne' is rarely used) This is difficult to argue with, but I think exaggerated. After reading the post I did an informal count of "ne" used against "ne" dropped during a 90 minute episode of a policier on TV5Monde. Here's what I noticed: 1. It was dropped about 75% of the time, used about 25%. So it's not quite "rare". 2. Older characters tended to retain it more often. 3. A main character who was written to be rebellious never used it once (so dropping it is a sort of linguistic clue to his character). 4. I'm just forming this idea, but it seems to me that in spoken French there are certain phrases where "ne" is almost always used, and certain phrases where it is almost always dropped. I think in these cases the use or drop of "ne" is to make it sound better, the same way "t" is added between "a" and "il", e.g. for euphony. On va au cinema (We were taught that 'on' was an option for 'nous', not that it is the main 1st person plural Most textbooks make it pretty clear that "on" is used frequently in spoken language. French in Action certainly does, and I'm pretty sure Assimil does. Ouais Here I think I might disagree most strongly with kanewai. From my observations (TV, Films, podcasts, novels), "ouais" isn't used as often as foreigners are led to believe. Here are the groups I see routinely using "ouais" on TV/films: 1. Children use it constantly. Teens use it a lot. 2. Stupid characters use it frequently. That is, when a writer wants a character to appear uneducated, they make them use "ouais" a lot. Often this applies to uneducated immigrants. 3. When a character agrees with someone, but wants to tinge their response with sarcasm, they might say "ouais". My conclusion (from admittedly limited exposure) is that using "ouais" can make you appear childish or uneducated. Now here's the first big caveat: my experience of spoken French is mainly limited to what I hear on TV and films. I realize that it is likely that French dialogue writers may give their characters a more formal register than they would have in real life. But on the other hand, the use of language style to build a character also says a lot about how people think about their language: the middle-aged rebel who always drops "ne" is a good example. My second caveat is that I'm not entirely disagreeing with kanewai, I just think his points were exaggerated. And I know he never intended his post to be dissected like I did, but I thought it would be interesting to discuss. So, what do you think? Do you have other examples of the differences between spoken and textbook French? A question I'd like to know the answer to is, do TV shows and films reflect spoken French very well? (Edited to nuance a few of my points). Edited by Jeffers on 31 March 2015 at 12:58pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5007 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 2 of 38 31 March 2015 at 2:05pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I think the term diglossia is being overused. French is just a normal language with
spoken language being slightly different from the standard variant, which is a normal thing. And how much the particular native's speech differs depends on their region of origin, education, age, intelligence and so on, it's not like there was a separate "standard" everyone used at the expense of the "literary" language. this is the wikipedia definition:
Really, do you think those details, like not using "ne" or having a lazier pronunciation of "oui"="ouais" is the same sort of difference as those wiki examples? I don't agree, especially as by far not everyone uses these variants. The standard French is actually used in everyday speech by lots of people or they differ from it only slightly. I don't think you can label everything as "diglossia", that way all the languages would suffer from it and every teenager would even be subject to triglosia (the standard variant used in writing school essais, the slightly different and very polite variant to use with granny or teachers, the slang used with friends over sms). As was said, the older people and the more educated ones tend to speak a more standard variant than the young or uneducated ones (I get to hear both even in Prague at times, so I don't need to rely only on my usual sources). That leads, for exemple here, to occassional discussions of whether something like diglossia won't be created in future and who is to blame for the horrible way the young people speak. It is the same kind of complaints as the rest of those towards the younger generation, in my opinion. I quite agree with Jeffers. omission of "ne" or the "ouais" thing is not that much of a difference, that way any kind of pronunciation deviation facilitating the speech at high speed would be a diglossia. ANd "on" is a normally taught grammar in all the courses I have ever seen. Sure, the course may not tell you it is used all the time but the courses are normally pretty unreliable as a measure of importance, frequency and necessity of any grammar feature. The vocabulary difference eyðimörk gives examples of is, in my opinion, not a sign of diglossia either. It is just widening of the vocabulary, it doesn't mean people don't say "homme" anymore and everyone just says "mec" all the time. They use both, with prevalence of either depending on their personal taste. From my experience, the language in many tv series taking place in our days and books of the lighter genres reflect the colloquial language really well in the dialogues, so I don't think it is a bad source, Jeffers :-) . However, I would agree the Quebec might be an exemple of diglossia where you can talk to the people in european French and get Quebeqois answers from people using standard French in writen contact. But there are better suited htlalers to speak of the Quebec in particular, than I. I've met only two people from there so far. However, the more educated one sounded much more standard and european than the other. But this is a really tiny (laughable) amount of examples to judge from. But if French is a diglossial language, than I don't know any non-diglossial one. English is full of differences between standard and colloquial language, I am already seeing some in Spanish but still nothing like the examples from the wikipedia definition. 11 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4705 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 3 of 38 31 March 2015 at 2:30pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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French definitely has different registers, but it's also, with the exception of Quebec,
fairly homogeneous. There is some slight variation on the old continent in terms of lexicon and pronunciation, but nothing really worth bickering about. French is much easier from this perspective than Mandarin (ugh) or Arabic (uuuugh). As for the mentioned examples - I use all of those in informal conversations but wouldn't write them in a thesis, and this is no different from certain English terminology I wouldn't use, and I don't think that English is very diglossic. Edited by tarvos on 31 March 2015 at 2:31pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4097 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 4 of 38 31 March 2015 at 2:41pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
"On" as a plural pronoun not only comes up in French courses, as stated, but I actually learnt it as a fourteen year old taking French at school. It's not only something that foreigners often learn about, but its status as "familiar" or "slang" French is highly exaggerated. Not only is it officially acceptable to write "on" as a plural pronoun on your French bac, it's even "tolerated" if your adjectives or participe passé are written in the plural/feminine (e.g. "On est restés amis" instead of "On est resté amis"). It's not what you'd consider "beautiful" French, and maybe French teachers try hard to get their students to avoid writing like this (I don't know — I wasn't educated in France), but they have to accept it. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4097 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 5 of 38 31 March 2015 at 2:44pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
That was precisely the point. No one thinks English is diglossic because they didn't learn the word "bloke" in their 9th grade English class. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4637 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 6 of 38 31 March 2015 at 2:52pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I totally agree with Cavesa's post.
With regard to nous/on, I read an interesting theory about it (sorry, can't remember who wrote it, it is many years ago) which claimed that this reflects a tendency in spoken French to simplify the verb conjugations. As, contrary to Latin, Spanish or Italian, you have to use the personal pronoun with the verb form, the ending does not play any role any longer for indicating the person. If we look at the verb "aimer": J'aime, tu aimes, il/elle aime, nous aimons, vous aimez, ils aiment. "aime, aimes, aiment" are all pronounced the same. So "aimons, aimez" are the odd ones out. Consequently, the tendency is to replace "nous aimons" by "on aime", thereby alligning it with the singular and the third person plural form. So the only odd one out becomes "vous aimez", but since this is the polite form (in addition to you-plural), there would be a stronger resistance to simplify it. I said spoken French, but it is seen more and more in the written language as well, and a famous TV show in France has the title "On n'est pas couché". Concerning the ne...pas, again I think it is an expression of simplification supressing the first part of the negation "ne", as the second part after the verb makes it perfectly clear that it is a negation, whether it's pas, jamais, rien or personne. French is after all the Romance language which has developed most radically towards an analytical language. Coming back to the initial question, it might seem that there is a big difference between spoken and written French, partly because of French language purism when it comes to the written standard, but I don't think one can talk about diglossia. Besides, there are many "sub-standards" in spoken French, and youngsters from the Parisian banlieu certainly have their own "argot" or sociolect or whatever one prefers to call it, but that is no different from what you will find in parts of London, New York or Berlin. And the spoken language of an Alsatian farmer is very different to that of a young Parisian. Edited by Ogrim on 31 March 2015 at 3:11pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5260 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 7 of 38 31 March 2015 at 2:59pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Where's emk when you need him? Wouldn't it be great to hear from him right now. I miss you, emk. Come back soon! Edited by iguanamon on 31 March 2015 at 3:04pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Arnaud25 Diglot Senior Member France Joined 3840 days ago 129 posts - 235 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Russian | Message 8 of 38 31 March 2015 at 3:18pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I don't even understand what you're talking about :)
4 persons have voted this message useful |
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