The language the French forbade
bbc.com
bbc.com
The occitan language that is learned in school is mostly a toy language. When Littré wrote his famous dictionary, from 1850 to 1875, he mentioned multiple dialects of the "langue d'Oc" which were still active in the South of France. Gascon, limousin, languedocien, catalan and provençal were distinct dialects. But there are no teachers fluent in any of these dialect, so during the 20th century they forged the "occitan" language which is a mix of these, but mostly built from provençal.
Overall, this article is very superficial. It wrote about troubadours, but forgot to mention a reference well-known in the UK: Richard Lionheart spoke in French and Provençal, and was probably not fluent in English. Living in France, in Aquitaine, he composed poetry in "langue d'Oc".
It's well known in France that the French Republic though that the local cultures were an obstacle to the unity of the nation. So they forbid every local language. There were panels in some schools with the text: "It is forbidden to spit and to speak Breton".
So, we slowly forgot our own language (the other parts of the country that were not dominated by the English to such a degree, actually look down on us a little bit, because we do not speak Welsh as our main dialect...).
Recently due to pushes from the government, more and more children are growing up and learning welsh, and it's now at the point that most jobs in wales are successfully requiring Welsh-speakers as part of their hiring.
It's completely possible to resurrect a dead language with native language speakers still in existence, it's faster than killing the language (It took 300 years to completely eradicate Welsh and only about 50 years of government efforts to resurrect it), it just requires the collective will to be there, and the wish to restore the culture (or some bastardized idealized version of it).
The other important thing to realize is that Welsh was ‘formalized’ in 1620 when the Bible was translated into it[1]. This had the double effect of unifying the distinct regional dialects into ‘high Welsh’ (a distinction which exists to this day!) but also, crucially, providing a standard text which people could use to learn to read and write. It meant that Welsh was able to flourish into a full legal language, and not just used as a ‘home’ language.
This gave it a backbone which was not present in other ‘regional’ languages (such as its nearest relation, Cornish), which in turn have all but died out.
With respect to the original post, I note that the Bible was only translated into Occitan in the modern era [2], which would support the evidence of it still being a language only used at home, and not in formal situations.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dafydd_Iwan
[1] https://cy.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beibl
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_translations_into_the_...
Mirandese used to be a very local language spoken in the north, and it was a dying language.
The last couple of years, a group of people started pushing to rescue it, and nowadays the situation has improve a lot with published books, dictionaries, even Asterix gets published in Mirandese and it gets taught to children on the primary schools on the region as additional activity.
Will this save the language long term? Maybe not, but I really like that they at least are trying to keep it alive.
Asterix seems to be a favourite for minority languages. There are seventy Asterix albums published in German regional dialects: https://www.asterix.com/de/die-buecher/die-asterix-mundart-r...
I wonder if the mix of pictures along with uncomplicated but correct dialogue makes Asterix popular for promoting languages.
The _truth_ is that the transition of Occitan speakers to French is by and large a process consented by the population (often encouraged by working men, like my grand-father who associated the "patois" with extremely backwards conditions) because it simply provided more economic and social opportunities at a time people started moving massively towards cities. In fact the South-West provided a lot of teachers during the 19th c. and was a Republican stronghold. Public institutions, which are not restricted to school (the first major catalyst being the army with the age of conscription), helped to put French in an insurmountable position of prestige, but it was more practical and less cynical than often portrayed.
It's more comfortable to blame an abstract entity like the government than your ancestors.
Of course, if Alsatian had been allowed or supported, more people would speak it as bilinguals, but would it be enough to save it? Thousands of languages are dying, especially those that are spoken in a small geographic area where another language seems economically more useful.
As an example, Romanche is an official language of Switzerland, yet it is disappearing at an alarming rate. Even the Basque language, which is rare in France because of a century of concealment, is not flourishing in Spain. Basque is a official regional language in Spain, and the population that can speak it grows slowly, but now the majority of those who live in the Basque region don't understand its traditional langage. When only 20-30% of the population can speak correctly a language, how long can it survive?
Which is kind of at odds with the idea above that "It's more comfortable to blame an abstract entity like the government than your ancestors. "
When it has the same legal rights as the dominant language, government funds to help run media and entertainment, and a strong culture determined to nurture it, I would argue that it can survive indefinitely. All of which are the case for Basque, which is in fairly rude health at the moment.
Alsatian is probably one of the local languages which suffered least due to Alsace having been conquered by Germany in 1870, and being reintegrated with its own set of laws and exemptions in 1918.
Hell, the republic just grouped everything which wasn't standard french under patois, regardless of them being languages, dialects, creoles, ….
Though just so we're clear, this is a long-standing issue of the french state and its centralised habits: Louis XIV banned Catalan back in 1700.
They did though, Louis XIV banned Catalan in 1700.
Although I guess it was not really about the "common people" and more about legal and official acts being in Catalan in Roussillon/Northern Catalonia[0].
Normands spoke French long before some emigrated to North America. Just ask the English.
In addition, when the colonists settled in New France and mixed together, standard French (the concept probably wasn't there at the time, but administrative French maybe) was the natural common denominator for them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinance_of_Villers-Cotter%C3... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_policy_in_France#Fren...
I think of my Alsatian colleagues that learnt their regional language mostly from their grandparents. That skill is still very useful on the other side of the border but you wouldn't know it if you ask the ministry of education in Paris: the dialect of the Haut-Rhin is relatively close to Baseldüütsch and for those that didn't learn at home, bilingual school opened the doors of employment to a lot of people there. There is a net regression of Alsatians who are functional in German, either dialect or standard. Good job opportunities in Basel are being increasingly filled by Germans as the generations progress, while the economy stagnates in France. Back at home, the regional reorganization of France under Hollande is unlikely to help efforts to preserve the regional language since Alsace has been incorporated into a mostly francophone eastern megaregion that has little interest to spend money on the promotion of some 'backwards' regional language or even the foresight to encourage a second language that is not English.
Anyway, the discouragement of regional languages is not only a problem in France, as others have noted. Next door in Switzerland, the regional patois like arpitan (a variety of franco-provençal, perhaps related to Occitan) were discouraged for a long time. Completely different to the approach adopted in Alemanic Switzerland.
My personal opinion: the desire to 'live together' starts on the local, not national level so more efforts are needed in that direction for a functional society and regional languages help.
That said, 1/ Occitan is a lot like Spanish (unlike, say, Breton or Basque which are very far from Latin (or French)) and 2/ most people were bilingual speakers of French + regional language at least as early as the middle of the 19th century. It is true that France fought aggressively to suppress local languages, but almost everyone understood French anyway.
Occitan and Catalan are more similar to each other than Catalan to Castillian or Occitan to French.
Edit: bambax said “Occitan is a lot like Spanish (unlike, say, Breton or Basque [...])”. He could have said “is a lot like Catalan”, or “is a lot like French”, or “is a lot like Gascon”. All are true to different degrees.
There are also people speaking various dialects of occitan in Toulouse, Bordeaux, Perpignan, Marseille and Nice, mixing it with french and with languages brought by immigrant communities.
There are rap songs in occitan, or mixing french occitan and arabic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1kK7iL9brY&list=PL2ztot6xjo...
I speak Catalan, and I can understand most written Occitan, for example.
“A language is a dialect with an army and navy” (said somebody, once!]
They really disappeared in earnest at the end of the 19th century when school was made compulsory, and exclusively in French, with children being punished for speaking any other language.
If so, I'd say that English and Occitan (for example) are not in the same league, therefore not competitors. For example, no school pupil will choose to do part of his schooling in Occitan unless he lives in that region and even then it doesn't really replace a 'real' foreign language -- you need to learn one of those anyway. (Right?) But in Europe, when one decides between English and another major European language, the easiest answer is not always the best answer. And the easy answer demonstrates the bulldozer effect of English.
(I'm not a fan of English BTW. I use it when it's useful to me, like any other. Others have proven themselves far more useful to me at times. Just not when I read Hacker News!)
So usually the most sought combinations are English and French, German or Spanish, which already covers our internal travel needs quite well.
Then a couple of Erasmus and the language knowledge can be ramped up to a few other European languages.
The configuration is even more complicated in French schools where there is the optional immersion in the regional language. That immersion generally begins at the earliest ages. But my point was that this regional language in no way limits the choice of the first foreign language later on. Therefore: I don't believe that Occitan is in any way menaced by English, but English may be chosen over other European languages later in one's scolarity.
As an aside, I don't quite agree with your statement that the foreign languages offered cover your travel needs. Well, that may be true, but I don't think that the most important element is mobility for travel, but rather mobility for employment and trade, especially in border regions. And I can name a LOT of countries where proficiency in the neighbour's language is severely lacking. Neighbours that are sometimes just a kilometre away. I've seen it myself.
More than once I had to speak English in the Flemish area in Belgium, because the person I was speaking to never bothered to keep their French up to date.
Likewise I happen to speak better French and German than some Swiss German and Romande friends of mine. It is ironic to watch them speak in English among themselves, which isn't an official national language.
So mindset matters as well.
I had heard of the Belgian example and am all too aware of Romands and Allemanics speaking English with each other because most don't care to learn another official language enough to do business in it. A couple of other examples that I've seen...
- Basel, CH: the German speaking Baslers are litterally glued to a now essentially francophone French city. Every one that I've met speaks better English than French. Of course it's clear that they have little economic motivation to do so.
- Wrocław, PL: many of the graduates of that city's fine universities may end up working in Germany (which is about 100 km away) but almost none of them come out of high school or university speaking fluent German. The system even discourages it, maybe because Wrocław (Breslau) was previously in Germany.