These are phrases that we hear regularly, especially in the media. The first: “Africans speak dialects.” The second: “In some of our regions, the peasants still speak the patois.” Now, have you noticed it? Those who are supposed to practice these “dialects” and these “patois” are generally poor, old, black people. And those who make these remarks generally hold all or part of the political, economic, intellectual or media power. The conclusion follows: “Behind the hierarchy of languages, there exists a hierarchy of people”, as sociolinguist James Costa puts it.
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Do we want other illustrations? The particular speech of the thugs is described as “slang” and that of the butchers, louchébem, as “jargon”. Two terms which, significantly, are never used to evoke the languages of poets, doctors or jurists, yet just as incomprehensible to ordinary mortals, as the philosopher Malo Morvan points out (1).
We observe the same condescension when it comes to pronunciation. According to a widely spread cliché, the elites use “French without an accent”. A stupidity without a name, since the accent simply describes the way of articulating a sentence. Whenever we speak, we speak with an accent! However, only the provincials and those at the bottom of the social scale are supposed to “have one” – and a bad one, of course.
No need to have followed long studies to understand it: all of these prejudices are directly linked to the extreme centralization of our country. “Modern France was built from Paris, the place of political power, by developing a feeling of superiority of the capital over ‘the province’ (the singular is significant) and of the cities (supposedly modern) over the countryside (supposedly backward) The social norms valued were therefore those, urban, of the capital city”, underlines the sociolinguist Philippe Blanchet (2). Revealingly, he continues, the word “urban” also means both “of the city” and “polite, courteous”, while the term “peasant” refers not only to what is rural or agricultural, but also to what is boorish and crude…
According to historian Olivier Grenouilleau, this discredit of the province dates back to the Ancien Régime. Under Louis XIV, it began to be described as the negative of the city, of “people of quality” and of the Court (3). A class contempt which will continue under the Republic, to the point of sometimes bordering on pure and simple racism. For centuries, great writers have disseminated in their works a sordid vision of certain French regions, as noted by another historian, Céline Piot (4). “Finally, the South could really use a tyrant who would build roads and force people to behave better, to look a little more like human beings,” Stendhal asserts. Balzac, evoking a Breton, writes for his part: his features “belonged less to our beautiful Caucasian race than to the genus of herbivores” (5). And these are not exceptions: Hugo, Mérimée, Michelet, Renan and many others went in the same direction (6).
A large part of the French intellectual elites thus contributed to establishing a real dichotomy between Paris and the other regions, in which, it goes without saying, there would be no cultures, but simple “folklores”, and where the we would not speak real languages, but vulgar patois. It is therefore useful to briefly recall what is the consensus among the academic community:
• From a linguistic point of view, all languages are equal. Only their political status distinguishes them. Some are privileged in education, administration, politics and the media, others not. This does not make the latter “dialects” or “patois”, but languages deprived of official status.
• Regional languages were practiced in the city. For centuries, Gascon was spoken in Bordeaux, Languedoc in Toulouse, Alsatian in Strasbourg, and so on.
• Many of these languages have given rise to literary masterpieces. Frédéric Mistral, to take just this one example, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1904 for a work written in Provençal.
We would dream of writing that this hierarchy between the languages of France belongs to bygone times, but it is still current today, particularly in advertising, television and cinema. Jean Jaurès spoke Languedoc? Napoleon, Corsica? Joan of Arc, Lorraine? It doesn’t matter: we never see a famous character use one of these languages in a film. And we are still waiting, in a country that proclaims its love for equality, for an 8 p.m. news program to be presented with the accent of Marseille, Mont-de-Marsan or Pointe-à-Pitre.
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(1) Classify our ways of speaking, classify people, by Malo Morvan. Common Editions.
(2) “How French society learned to despise ‘peasants’ and their ‘patois’“, by Philippe Blanchet. The Conversation, February 25, 2024.
(3) Our little homelands, by Olivier Grenouilleau. Gallimard.
(4) The Factory of the Other: the South in the 19th century or the invention of French hatred, by Céline Piot. Didactica Historica, No. 6/2020.
(5) “The Bretons, ‘white negroes’?“, by Ronan Le Coadic, in From domination to recognition. Antilles, Africa and Brittany, Rennes University Press, 2013.
(6) The Black Legend of Soldier O, by André Neyton. Occitan drama center.
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The Passem!, the relay race for the Occitan/Gascon language, takes place this year from April 30 to May 5 from Tarbes to Mont-de-Marsan, over a distance of 1,100 kilometers. For five nights and six days, thousands of people will pass on a witness, symbol of the transmission of language between generations. A festive and popular event in which you can participate by running, accompanying, buying t-shirts or kilometres. A symbolic stage will also take place in Paris on Sunday April 28 at Parc Montsouris, from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. It will be followed by a canter (polyphonic songs specific to the Gascon Pyrenees).
The subjects of the 2024 patent finally translated into Breton
While a circular from November 2023 indicated that the subjects of the patent would all be published in French, and not in Breton, the Ministry of National Education reversed course on April 19. “The methods of treatment in modern regional languages of subjects of [brevet] and their translation” will be renewed, specifies the Minister of National Education Nicole Belloubet in a press release shared by Finistère senator Nadège Havet.
Conference in Marennes on May 3: “Let’s have fun with the French language!”
Why do we say “grandmother” and not “grandmother”? And why do we say “eighty” and not “three-score”? These are some of the questions I will answer on May 3 as part of the Franco Fiesta festival of French-speaking cultures, organized in Marennes-Hiers-Brouage (Charente-Maritime). I will rely in particular on examples taken from my latest book, Let’s cultivate the French language (ed. Héliopoles). Meet at 6 p.m. at the House of Services and Initiatives. Entrance to Place Carnot in Marennes.
TO WATCH
Nolwenn Korbell is one of the strongest personalities on the Breton scene. Author and composer, she performs here Ha my (“And if”).
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