The French Language Today

A Linguistic Introduction

Adrian Battye, Marie-Anne Hintze, Paul Rowlett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781136903359
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the French language from the perspective of modern linguistics. Placing French within its social and historical context, the authors highlight the complex, diverse aspects of the language in a lively and accessible way. A variety of topics is covered, including the distribution of French in the world, the historical development of standard French, the sound system of French, its sentence patterns, and its stylistic and geographical variations. Fully updated and revised, this new edition places a greater emphasis on sociolinguistics. To make the book more user-friendly, the following new features have been added: * a further reading guide at the end of each chapter * a glossary of linguistic terms * an expanded bibliography and index.

1 The external history of the French language

The standardisation of French and its distribution in the world today

In Chapters 2—4 we analyse the linguistic structure of the French language today. Before that, we focus on the external, or sociolinguistic, history of French, that is, the developing relationship between the French language and its users. In 1: 3-7 we outline the key historical and socio-cultural factors which have played a part in the evolution and diffusion of French. But first, we consider the status of French around the world: Where, and by whom, is it spoken?

1 La francophonie: How many French speakers are there in the world?

The term francophonie was originally coined in 1880 by the geographer Onésime Reclus to refer to countries where French is used, and this is one of the meanings the term retains today (1: 7.1). Now, although it may be relatively easy to pinpoint 'Francophone' countries on a map, that is, countries where French has a particular status and officially recognised functions, determining the exact size of the world's Francophone population is no easy task, not least because few countries include questions on language use in their censuses. Furthermore, we can't assume that Francophone countries are monolingual, or that all, or even the majority, of their population are French speakers. As we'll see when we examine matters more closely, French is frequently used in multilingual societies, and in many cases it's the language (but not necessarily the only language) of a minority of the population.

When considering language use it helps to distinguish between societies and individuals. For instance, in many countries, and in France itself, French isn't the only language spoken by many individuals. Nevertheless, in society, it enjoys a privileged position by virtue of its status as official language, that is, a language used in government, administration and education, at national, regional or local level. Elsewhere, French may be a vehicular language, used as a means of communication by speakers of different languages. Yet again, as in North Africa for instance, French may be a language with special status, widely used by intellectuals or educated elites for academic or cultural purposes. As for individuals, they may be mother-tongue speakers, having acquired the language in childhood, and French may be their usual or vernacular language. Others may speak French as a second language, having acquired it through education generally, and/or having been taught, wholly or in part, through the medium of French. Finally, there may be foreign language learners, for whom French is only a school subject and whose level of proficiency may be fairly limited.

It's on the basis of individual bilingualism that the 1999 French government report Etat de la francophonie dans le monde provides the following figures for numbers of French speakers, classified either as francophones réels (112,660,000), that is, first- or second-language speakers who use the language daily, or francophones occasionnels (60,612,000), often living in developing countries or in bilingual societies, using French occasionally, while normally using another language. To these are added the 100-110 million learners of French as a foreign language. Given these figures, a league table ranking the languages of the world according to numbers of speakers would place French in tenth or eleventh position behind Chinese, English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Malay and possibly Japanese. The perception that French fulfils a special role as a world language, second only to English, therefore rests not on the absolute number of speakers, but, rather, on its presence throughout the world and its cultural prestige.

2 The geographical distribution of French

The map in Appendix II shows that French is spoken on every continent. However, this isn't a recent development; French spread across Europe and further afield well before it came to dominate in France (1:5.1). For instance, the Norman dialect of Northern France extended to England after the Conquest (1066), and not only had a profound influence on the subsequent development of English, but is also the source of the surviving varieties of French spoken in the Channel Islands (5: 2.2). Similarly, the Crusades brought the first contacts between France and the Middle East (notably Syria and Lebanon). The development of overseas trading-posts and colonisation from the seventeenth century onwards led to the diffusion of French in parts of North America and the Indian Ocean; in the eighteenth century, to Oceania; and in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to Asia and large portions of Africa. Further, by the end of the seventeenth century, French had become the major international language of culture in the courts of Europe, and of diplomacy, a status it retained until 1919, when, at the insistence of US President Wilson and British Prime Minister Lloyd George, the Treaty of Versailles was drafted in English as well as French. Let's now see, continent by continent, and country by country, where and by whom French is spoken today.

2.1 Europe

French is the historic language of several countries and regions of Europe. France, with its population of 58.5 million (1999 census), accounts for nearly half the world total of mother-tongue French speakers. In Monaco (population 30,000), as in France, French is the only official language and the vernacular language of virtually the whole population.

In the Aosta Valley in Italy, French was recognised as an official language, together with Italian, in 1948, and the use of French has progressively increased in the education system where, since 1993, both languages are used as a medium of instruction. It's estimated that about 20,000 people, mostly concentrated in the more rural areas, of the total population of 116,000 speak French or a local variety of Franco-Provençal (5: 2.2). In the Vallées vaudoises, west of Turin, an estimated 20,000 speakers also use a local variety of Franco-Provençal, together with Italian and Piedmontese.

In Switzerland, French shares with Italian and German the status of national official language, a fourth, Romansch, having regional official status. According to Rossillon (1995: 61), 19.2 per cent of the population, that is some 1.3 million people, are mother-tongue French speakers. These people live in the west of the country (in the cantons of Vaud, Geneva, Neuchâtel and Jura, where French is the sole official language for administration and education). In the canton of the Valais (officially bilingual German/French since 1844), the population now predominantly speak French. The Swiss dialects of Franco-Provençal have, apart from a handful of lexical items, disappeared in favour of French in all but a few mountain valleys and in Valais.

The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg has a population of approximately 395,000. Its national language is a Germanic dialect, Luxembourgish, with Standard German as the written medium of communication. French is the mother tongue of a minority of the population only, but all three languages have official status. In reality, French is used throughout the Duchy and, especially in urban areas, a trilingual situation prevails, thanks to the status and prestige accorded to French since 1946, as the language of education and administration.

The peaceful coexistence of French with other languages in Europe doesn't extend to Belgium where a situation of linguistic conflict has existed between French and Flemish speakers for much of the country's history. We shouldn't forget that the border between France and Belgium is a mere 160 years old, and takes no account of a 1,000-year-old language boundary separating Flemish-speaking Flanders in the north from the four French-speaking provinces (Hainault, Namur, Liège and Luxembourg) of Wallonia in the south. Traditionally, the French-speaking areas were dominant economically and politically, while they represented a minority of the population. French was the sole official language until 1932, when Dutch was given official status in Flanders. Nowadays, the Flemish, who represent about 52 per cent of a total population of ten million, have the stronger economy. This situation of social, economic and political imbalance lies behind numerous political conflicts, and is exacerbated by the fact that the officially bilingual capital, Brussels, lies north of the linguistic boundary, yet is in reality 85 per cent Francophone. Indeed, confrontation between the two linguistic communities and the resulting perceived threat posed to the unity of the Belgian state led, in 1993, to an amendment to the constitution allowing the virtual separation, on linguistic lines, of the French-speaking and Flemish-speaking communities within a federal state.

Within Great Britain, finally, on the Channel Islands of Jersey, Guernsey and Sark, French may be used for some official purposes, but it's only on Jersey that French is officially recognised as an administrative language together with English.

2.2 The Americas

The largest French-speaking community on the American continent is in Canada where, in the 1996 population census, 24 per cent of the total population of 30,286,600 reported French to be their mother tongue. However, two-thirds of Canada's French speakers are concentrated in the province of Quebec, where they form some 80 per cent of the population of 7,419,900. The remainder are concentrated in New Brunswick, Ontario, Manitoba, Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan (Canada Yearbook 1999). Although census figures from 1971 to 1996 indicate that the numbers of people who use French in most contexts and those who only use it in the home in Quebec have increased slightly, they also make it clear that, outside Quebec and New Brunswick, French is significantly losing ground to English.

The presence of French in Canada goes back to the early seventeenth century and the establishment of fur trading-posts along the lower Saint Lawrence river and settlements in the bay of Fundy (Acadia) and along the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Acadia was surrendered to Britain in 1713, and in 1755 two-thirds of its inhabitants were forcibly driven out in what is called le grand dérangement. Some found their way to other settlements on the eastern seaboard of North America, a few travelling down by sea as far as Louisiana, which had been claimed by France as a colony in 1682. As a result, with the exception of New Brunswick (approximately 245,000 speakers), only a small minority of French speakers remain in Acadia today. Fifty years after Acadia, the Saint Lawrence lowlands, officially named Quebec, were ceded to Britain in 1763. The British North America Act of 1887, which established the Confederation of Canada, recognised French and English as the official languages, but the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed the progressive erosion of the rights of French speakers in courts, legislatures and schools outside Quebec. As in Belgium, conflict surrounding the language issue isn't recent, and is closely bound up with economic and political issues. In 1967 the report of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism recognised that Francophones suffered discrimination in terms of social advancement in industry and commerce. This led in 1969 to the Official Languages Act, establishing French and English as the official languages of Canada with equal status in federal government and administration. French and English also have equal status at the provincial level in New Brunswick, whereas since the adoption of Bill 101 in 1977, after the separatist Parti québécois came to power, French has been the sole official language of the province of Quebec. Bill 101 is also known as the Charts de la langue française and requires French to be the normal language of the workplace, communications and business. In addition, the provincial government of Quebec maintains the Office de la langue française, which offers a legal mechanism to protect the rights of French speakers and plays a role in developing new terminology. While the future of French in Quebec seems to have been consolidated by the efforts of the federal government and its commitment to the preservation of both English and French language and culture within a multicultural society, the future of French beyond the provincial limits of Quebec (diluted by anglicisation in response to social and economic pressures) is much more debatable.

French is also the official language of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon (population 6,100), an island group situated in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence which administratively forms part of France as a collectivité territoriale.

Within the United States there are two major concentrations of French speakers. First, in the New England states of Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont and New Hampshire, approximately 200,000 descendants of the 2-3 million immigrants from Quebec (particularly in the nineteenth century) still claim French as their mother tongue (Rossillon 1995: 32). However, the maintenance of French is steadily being eroded by the shift from bilingualism to English monolingualism. The second concentration is in Louisiana (a French colony from 1682 to 1803), where the ranks of the initial colonists from France were swelled by immigrants from Acadia - the Cajuns (or (a)cadiens). In the 1990 US census, over a million inhabitants of Louisiana claimed French ancestry, with 261,678 stating that they spoke French, Cajun or Louisiana Creole at home. The most widely spoken variety is called français (a)cadien, similar to the variety spoken in Canada. However, a small number of descendants of the earliest colonists use a more or less standard variety of French, and there are also some speakers of a French-lexicon creole, similar to Haitian Creole (on creoles see 5: 5). In 1968 a state agency, the Conseil pour le développement du français en Louisiane (CODOFIL), was founded to promote and preserve the French language in Louisiana through education and the promotion of Cajun culture. (On the linguistic situation of Francophone Louisiana, see Valdman 1997.)

In the Caribbean and South America, three territories which are legally and administratively part of France as départements d'outre-mer - the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, as well as French Guyana - have French as their official language, that is, the language of administration, education and of the urban professional elites. However, the majority of the population (950,000 overall according to the 1999 French census) also use a French-lexicon creole for private and unofficial purposes. Indeed, according to Chaudenson (1989: 156), 20 per cent of the population in Martinique, 40 per cent in Guadeloupe and 70 per cent in Guyana are monolingual in creole. French, and Haitian Creole since 1987, are the official languages of the Republic of Haiti, where French is spoken by less than 10 per cent of the population of 7 million, the rest being predominantly monolingual in creole. These cases illustrate a situation which is common in other areas of the Francophone world. The use of French isn't regional (as it is in Belgium or Canada, for instance)...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the second edition
• Preface to the first edition
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The external history of the French language: the standardisation of French and its distribution in the world today
• 2 The sound system of French
• 3 French word structure
• 4 The sentence structure of French
• 5 Varieties of French
• Appendix I: Dialects and regional languages
• Appendix II: French in the world
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index