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The language the French forbade

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Re: The language the French forbade

#31

Post by zerealshadowban »

VK538FY wrote: post #25
daniel_olivier wrote: post #22

Isn't reading such an article in English abit ironic?

Are you referring to the bulldozer effect of English against other major languages? 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?)…

I was given a choice between Ancient Greek and (modern) English...

Re: The language the French forbade

#32

Post by glandium »

laurentoget wrote: post #14

This article makes it sound like occitan is mostly used in rural communities to talk about local cuisine and folk tradition. 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=H1kK7i…

I grew up near Perpignan, and never knew some people around there would speak Occitan. A lot speak catalan, though.

Re: The language the French forbade

#33

Post by AlunAlun »

fao_ wrote: post #30
idoubtit wrote: post #27

Alas, occitan is a dead language. Of course, a few old people still use their local dialect, but how many parents mainly speak in occitan to their children? How many people learn it out of school? Who grows speaking occitan with friends and enriching it with new expressions, like any living language? Occitan may have 3 millions of speakers in France, the Latin language still has more. The occitan language that is lea…

In South Wales of the UK, we were forbidden from speaking Welsh (I should note that the southern dialect is different from the northern, and vice-versa). Any child that spoke Welsh in school would have a thick and heavy board attached to their neck, to wear in shame (The "Welsh Knot"[1]). It was forbidden across the board, and gradually died out. So, we slowly forgot our own language (the other parts of the country t…

Nice post, I would add a couple of points re. Welsh. The first is that it was not really dead 50 years ago. It got as low as 15% of the population in the 50s/60s, and was undoubtedly headed for obscurity and ‘death’, until the revival, as you mentioned. But it was still alive (q.v. Dafydd Iwan’s [0] most famous song, “Yma o Hyd”). Now welsh is spoken by around 18% of adults and 25% of children, and is increasingly seen as an important part of modern Wales.

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_...

Re: The language the French forbade

#34

Post by AlunAlun »

idoubtit wrote: post #28
titanix2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be true for some languages such as Occitan or Picard but others were purposefully killed by the republic. Alsatian for instance was forbidden in schools. If prestige only was at play Alsatians may have mostly became bilinguals (similar situation exists in Africa, Hong-Kong, India) instead of unilingual speakers of French.

In order to unify the country, the French Republic fought against every language. Alsatian was forbidden in schools, but it was the same for anything outside French. 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…

> When only 20-30% of the population can speak correctly a language, how long can it survive?

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.

Re: The language the French forbade

#35

Post by AlunAlun »

glandium wrote: post #32
laurentoget wrote: post #14

This article makes it sound like occitan is mostly used in rural communities to talk about local cuisine and folk tradition. 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=H1kK7i…

I grew up near Perpignan, and never knew some people around there would speak Occitan. A lot speak catalan, though.

That’s because it’s possible to argue that Occitan, Catalan, Aranese etc are all ‘dialects’ of the same language.

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!]

Re: The language the French forbade

#36

Post by pjmlp »

idoubtit wrote: post #27

Alas, occitan is a dead language. Of course, a few old people still use their local dialect, but how many parents mainly speak in occitan to their children? How many people learn it out of school? Who grows speaking occitan with friends and enriching it with new expressions, like any living language? Occitan may have 3 millions of speakers in France, the Latin language still has more. The occitan language that is lea…

To give an example similar to fao_, very few foreigners are aware that Portugal actually has two official languages.

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.

Re: The language the French forbade

#37

Post by pjmlp »

VK538FY wrote: post #25
daniel_olivier wrote: post #22

Isn't reading such an article in English abit ironic?

Are you referring to the bulldozer effect of English against other major languages? 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?)…

A couple of European countries offer the option to learn two foreign languages during school.

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.

Re: The language the French forbade

#38

Post by seszett »

VK538FY wrote: post #18
laurentoget wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not true. The standardization of the french language started with Francois I, centuries before the revolution.

I'd like to know more. In New France, the majority was from northwestern France (Normands, Poitevins, etc.) but somehow they managed to settle on a language that is surprisingly similar to Parisian French despite the accent and informal terms whose northwestern roots are clear (according to the linguists that I've read). So did the colonists of New France build on the efforts of François 1er?

The version of French that became standard French was not exactly the language spoken in Paris (the local Parisian accent has mostly disappeared now but it can be heard in old movies) but the one spoken in Western France, where the French nobility lived and spent time (the Loire valley is now known for the castles they built there).

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.

Re: The language the French forbade

#39

Post by masklinn »

anateus wrote: post #11
eeks wrote: post #3

It certainly is not "the French". It's the "French Republic". Local dialects lived happily in France for over a Millennia under the Monarchy. The French dialect, mostly spoken in the Jacobin circles in Paris, was imposed by the revolutionaries as a mean to achieve "equality".

Although the French Revolution started the first concerted effort at suppression, L’Academie Francaise was created over 100 years earlier by Richelieu. I feel like the only reason the monarchy didn't impose its edicts is that they just didn't care about the common people that much one way or the other :)

> Although the French Revolution started the first concerted effort at suppression, L’Academie Francaise was created over 100 years earlier by Richelieu. I feel like the only reason the monarchy didn't impose its edicts is that they just didn't care about the common people that much one way or the other :)

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].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Catalonia

Re: The language the French forbade

#40

Post by taejo »

pjmlp wrote: post #36
idoubtit wrote: post #27

Alas, occitan is a dead language. Of course, a few old people still use their local dialect, but how many parents mainly speak in occitan to their children? How many people learn it out of school? Who grows speaking occitan with friends and enriching it with new expressions, like any living language? Occitan may have 3 millions of speakers in France, the Latin language still has more. The occitan language that is lea…

To give an example similar to fao_, very few foreigners are aware that Portugal actually has two official languages. 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 ta…

> even Asterix gets published in Mirandese

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...

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