The language the French forbade
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Re: The language the French forbade
#2There _used_ to be many dialects spoken in France, like in most European countries.
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.
Re: The language the French forbade
#3It 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".
Re: The language the French forbade
#4My grand father only spoke Occitan until he was 7 years old and went to school. My father can still speak the language fluently, although he lacks practice.
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.
Re: The language the French forbade
#5My grand father only spoke Occitan until he was 7 years old and went to school. My father can still speak the language fluently, although he lacks practice. 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 Fra…
Occitan is closer to Catalan than to Spanish.
Re: The language the French forbade
#6My grand father only spoke Occitan until he was 7 years old and went to school. My father can still speak the language fluently, although he lacks practice. 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 Fra…
Occitan is closer to Catalan than to Spanish.
Both are a lot like Spanish (unlike Breton or Basque).
Re: The language the French forbade
#7My grand father only spoke Occitan until he was 7 years old and went to school. My father can still speak the language fluently, although he lacks practice. 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 Fra…
To add to that, Basque is not even Indo-European, let alone Latinate. And Breton is a Brythonic Celtic language (as opposed to the Goidelic branch, home to Gaelic) similar to Welsh and Cornish.
Re: The language the French forbade
#8There _used_ to be many dialects spoken in France, like in most European countries. 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.
It's the story of many local languages / dialects in many other countries too.
Re: The language the French forbade
#9It 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".
Also "the language"? The french republic started actively suppressing all local languages (breton, auvergnat, arabic, kabyle, …) starting from the mid 19th century and until late in the 20th, this ramped up significantly with the free, universal and mandatory education laws of 1881 and 1882: all education was done in french.
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.
Re: The language the French forbade
#10Well, I still speak it somewhat...
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.