Lauragais south-east of Toulouse forgot what little French they knew as soon as they left school: ‘French leaves no more trace in their minds than Latin does in the minds of college students.’ In the Cerdagne, in the eastern Pyrenees, language teachers inadvertently created a bizarre school pidgin composed of Latin, French and Catalan. Men returning from the army quickly reverted to their native tongue. A man who came home to Cellefrouin near Angoulême in 1850 after seven years in the army and thirty years in America was speaking the patois of his boyhood again within a few days. Conscription spread the national language but it could also preserve the older forms of patois, and some recruits never learned French at all. There are several reports of Breton soldiers being shot by their comrades in the First World War because they were mistaken for Germans or because they failed to obey incomprehensible orders.
Many people who were recorded in statistics as French-speakerswould have spoken the language only during a certain phase of life, when they were serving an apprenticeship, travelling to markets or working in a town. The dormancy of the local language could create the impression – often a false impression – that it was disappearing. For the last hundred and fifty years, examples of ‘pure’ patois have been collected from people invariably described as ‘old’, as if a separate, senescent species somehow propagates itself and its language without ever growing young. Generation after generation, countless people said the same thing: that the old language was spoken now only by the old people. A woman in the small Alsatian town of Thann told me this (in French) in 2004. She was probably born in the early 1970s. It turned out, however, that when she talked to her little daughter at home, she used Alsatian. The younger woman who was with her was introduced – and introduced herself – as an example of the generation that has almost forgotten the language and will see the last speakers of it die away. Yet she, too, spoke Alsatian with her mother and grandmother. She also took many of her school classes in Alsatian. She could easily have told me in Alsatian that Alsatian was dying out.
*
T HE BELIEF THAT the proliferation of different dialects is related to the economic and cultural backwardness of a region is no longer tenable. President Pompidou’s statement, in 1972, that ‘There is no place for regional languages in a France that is destined to set its mark on Europe’ now seems to belong to a distant age. Mountainous areas, like the remote Cantal where Pompidou was born, might have swarmed with micro-dialects, but so did some of the more vibrant and industrialized parts of France: Normandy, Flanders, Alsace and parts of the Mediterranean coast.
The Abbé Grégoire and all the later politicians and teachers who tried to eradicate ‘patois’ wanted to impose a single language. They were bound to see French as the language of authority and everything else as a sign of chaos, barbarism or rebellion. But official surveys revealed a picture of unexpected order. Far from being a slate on which the modern principles of liberty and equality could be inscribed, France appeared to have been divided up long before, notby kings and armies, but by ancient, inscrutable processes that would not easily be changed by act of parliament. The Revolution created a new nation and a new calendar, but it also discovered a country – or countries – that had been taking shape even before the nation had a name and the Christian calendar had been invented.
Something like a fault-line ran across the land. The Abbé Grégoire saw only part of this rift – the division of the languages of Oc and Oïl – and blamed it on ‘the former feudal domination’. The curiously sharp division of Oc and Oïl does appear to follow the boundaries of medieval provinces for part of its course, but it also matches several other ancient
Many people who were recorded in statistics as French-speakerswould have spoken the language only during a certain phase of life, when they were serving an apprenticeship, travelling to markets or working in a town. The dormancy of the local language could create the impression – often a false impression – that it was disappearing. For the last hundred and fifty years, examples of ‘pure’ patois have been collected from people invariably described as ‘old’, as if a separate, senescent species somehow propagates itself and its language without ever growing young. Generation after generation, countless people said the same thing: that the old language was spoken now only by the old people. A woman in the small Alsatian town of Thann told me this (in French) in 2004. She was probably born in the early 1970s. It turned out, however, that when she talked to her little daughter at home, she used Alsatian. The younger woman who was with her was introduced – and introduced herself – as an example of the generation that has almost forgotten the language and will see the last speakers of it die away. Yet she, too, spoke Alsatian with her mother and grandmother. She also took many of her school classes in Alsatian. She could easily have told me in Alsatian that Alsatian was dying out.
*
T HE BELIEF THAT the proliferation of different dialects is related to the economic and cultural backwardness of a region is no longer tenable. President Pompidou’s statement, in 1972, that ‘There is no place for regional languages in a France that is destined to set its mark on Europe’ now seems to belong to a distant age. Mountainous areas, like the remote Cantal where Pompidou was born, might have swarmed with micro-dialects, but so did some of the more vibrant and industrialized parts of France: Normandy, Flanders, Alsace and parts of the Mediterranean coast.
The Abbé Grégoire and all the later politicians and teachers who tried to eradicate ‘patois’ wanted to impose a single language. They were bound to see French as the language of authority and everything else as a sign of chaos, barbarism or rebellion. But official surveys revealed a picture of unexpected order. Far from being a slate on which the modern principles of liberty and equality could be inscribed, France appeared to have been divided up long before, notby kings and armies, but by ancient, inscrutable processes that would not easily be changed by act of parliament. The Revolution created a new nation and a new calendar, but it also discovered a country – or countries – that had been taking shape even before the nation had a name and the Christian calendar had been invented.
Something like a fault-line ran across the land. The Abbé Grégoire saw only part of this rift – the division of the languages of Oc and Oïl – and blamed it on ‘the former feudal domination’. The curiously sharp division of Oc and Oïl does appear to follow the boundaries of medieval provinces for part of its course, but it also matches several other ancient
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