Regional Language Policies in France during World War II

A. Amit

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137300157
• eBook ISBN: 9781137300164
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

During Germany's occupation of France in WWII, French regional languages became a way for people to assert their local identities. This book offers a detailed historical sociolinguistic analysis of the various language policies applied in France's regions (Brittany, Southern France, Corsica and Alsace) before, during and after WWII.

1

Introduction

1.1 Presentation

Since the French Revolution, French has been the unique, shared language of the French Republic as well as an essential element of the French national identity. The French language was one of the weapons of the state in building modern French identity and in imposing cohesion upon a divided society. As a result of centuries of determined effort by public policy-makers, the uniformity of the French language is unparalleled in Western Europe and elsewhere.

However, despite its linguistically homogenous image, France is nevertheless one of the most multilingual states in Western Europe. Excluding the languages of French overseas departments and territories and the languages of immigrants, seven regional languages are still in use within the borders of the French hexagon: Breton in Brittany, several varieties of Occitan (including Provençal) in Southern France, German dialects in Alsace and Lorraine, Corsican on the island of Corsica, Basque and Catalan near the Spanish border and Flemish near the border with Belgium. All these languages belong to areas that were historically autonomous or independent and were militarily conquered or administratively attached during the expansion of France.

After the French Revolution, these languages became not only minority languages, but also marginalized and stigmatized, disadvantageously situated compared to French, the dominant national language. As part of the educational policy instituted in France in the 1880s, schoolteachers were instructed to discourage the use of regional languages. Furthermore, over the early decades of the twentieth century and in spite of many changes in social and economic life, the areas in which such regional languages were prevalent remained largely rural and agricultural. Since they were significantly affected by the restrictive language policy of French governments over the years, they offer a particularly useful case study for investigating both ‘top-down’ language policies implemented by the French authorities and ‘bottom-up’ initiatives and practices carried out by the regional speech communities themselves.

Until World War II, the promotion of the French language in a highly centralized state faced only minor resistance. However, regional languages were able to survive mainly because they fulfilled the specific function of maintaining local identities in their respective regions. In the first half of the twentieth century, these languages changed their functional role in French society, becoming a way for people to assert their ‘little homeland’ regional identity, and they were strengthened during Germany’s occupation of France in World War II, when the struggle to preserve regional languages and local identities rapidly became more overt and political.

Based on a field study in historical sociolinguistics (namely the study of the relationship between language and society in its historical dimension), this book aims to describe and evaluate the various language policies applied in French regions during WWII and immediately before it, and attempts to answer the following questions: How did regional speech communities in France deal with the contact of their languages with French in the interwar period? How did different ‘micro-level’ agents in those regions manage these contacts during the war and what were their language choices? What were the difficulties of maintaining these regional languages? How did macro-level institutional agents intervene (namely state authorities in France, Germany and Italy)? And finally, what were the consequences of these language policies in the post-war period?

1.2 Theoretical considerations

1.2.1 Problems and obstacles

Almost seventy years after the liberation of France, there is still no detailed, thorough analysis of regional language policies during WWII and in those years that led up to the war. Indeed, the study of such a delicate subject is quite complicated, for two main reasons: first, regionalists who collaborated with the occupying German authorities and their allies in implementing regional language policy are the object of a post-war selective amnesia. Generally, they are dismissed as a disturbing but small minority who represented only a small fraction of the population in these regions – a matter that still nourishes many a polemic in France. Second, French regional language policies seem to have a pluralistic character, and provided as many case studies of collaboration as there were language practices. This being the case, an integrated research project seems daunting.

In truth, any research that deals with the WWII period faces serious difficulties. It seems that even today, the wounds are still open and will not heal until the demise of the last generations who participated directly or indirectly in the war. The grey zones are numerous, and every available primary source is deeply involved in these events and is used as a way to settle personal accounts, to omit certain facts or deliberately magnify others. Accordingly, all research about the war period still raises endless controversies.

In addition, there is a great deal of confusion in dealing with the history of regional languages in France during WWII, since the tendency has always been to consider each region as a different case without highlighting the common denominators. The initial intention of this book is therefore to describe in one coherent framework: the historical sociolinguistic situation and the different regional language policies imposed during the war. To meet this goal, an epistemological framework will first delineate the boundaries of the study, followed by some research hypotheses dealing with the scientific approach that should be adopted for such research, and definitions of some relevant basic notions.

1.2.2 Epistemological framework

In recent years, various developments in language research have contributed to a fusion of related or different fields of study, offering new areas of research. One of these is sociolinguistics, which unites linguistics with the social sciences, and historical sociolinguistics, which applies sociolinguistic methods to historical situations to find analogies and similarities.

The premises of the sociolinguistic angle were outlined by Charles Bally and Antoine Meillet in the early twentieth century, although the study of language contact (today, part of sociolinguistics) had already begun in the late nineteenth century with William Dwight Whitney (1881), who discussed the role of borrowing in language contact. The various studies of Meillet (see, for example, Meillet, 1921) provoked a revolution because before him, linguists were content to describe the development of a language without considering the social conditions existing in the speech community which gave rise to those changes.¹ In fact, it was not until half a century after Meillet that linguists really associated with sociologists to ask new questions relating to the singular linguistic situations of language in society. Accordingly, it is interesting to ask why, until the 1980s, diachronic linguists traditionally refused to relate the history of a language with the history of its speakers.

However, contemporary research does indeed link language and society assuming that one reflects the other. According to Hamers & Blanc (1983), languages represent intergroup relations (for example, a speech community in which two languages are in contact) as well as the relations of this group with other communities. Languages therefore may become a salient dimension of this interaction, its creation and its maintenance.

Under these conditions, current sociolinguistic research focusing on language contacts has flourished. But while synchronic research abounds, that related to historical aspects seems marginal and neglected. Thus, the majority of studies on language contacts focus mainly on the synchronic aspects leaving aside the diachronic side of the story. The result is that the ancient language contacts are continually sidelined.

1.2.3 Research hypotheses

The theoretical framework of this book proposes extending existing sociolinguistic theories to adapt the fusion of various fields of research to encompass those of linguistics, sociolinguistics, history, sociology and political sciences. The epistemological framework of this book is therefore based on three hypotheses: first, that this kind of research should involve a multidisciplinary approach; second, that the diachronic research of languages should be conducted in its social context; and third, that a diachronic research such as that presented in this book must integrate analytical instruments and means of validation of synchronic linguistics.

The first hypothesis – the need for a multidisciplinary approach – stems from the double nature of sociolinguistics, which can be viewed as a study both of the effects of society on language and of the effects of language on society. Thus, sociolinguistics (especially in the English-speaking world) generally divides those who seek to explain language phenomena through social aspects and those who seek to explain social phenomena through language aspects. Boutet & Heller (2007, p. 308) highlighted the difference between the former, who find themselves institutionally linked to linguistics, and the latter, who are related to anthropology, education sciences, culture studies, and more rarely to sociology. This breakdown indicates, on the one hand, the willingness of linguists to separate their scientific activity from the use of language in society, and on the other hand, the will of non-linguists dealing with the relationship between language and society to consider their activity as part of all social practices, including those that are the subject of their scientific interest.

The establishment of sociolinguistics as a separate branch can be more or less seen as a desire to build an interfacial discipline alongside social sciences and linguistics. In this case, ‘socio-’ is not an abbreviation of ‘social’, but rather of ‘sociology’ (Boutet & Heller, 2007, p. 307). In other words, the deeply interdisciplinary nature of sociolinguistics reflects the combination of at least two disciplines, sociology and linguistics. In fact, the definition of the field of sociolinguistics has given rise to many debates, including the controversy around its ambiguous boundaries. Achard (1986), for example, considered sociolinguistics as a sub-field of both linguistics and sociology, while Gadet (2003) opposed this alleged undervaluation and attributed to sociolinguistics a broader vision as the study of language-use in its authentic social context. However, in the specific case of France, the fact that most (if not all) sociolinguists came from linguistics and not from the social sciences, has resulted in French sociolinguistics being regarded as a branch of linguistics (Boutet & Heller, 2007, p. 307).

The second hypothesis of this research is that historical research on regional languages should be done in its social context. This approach was concretized by the work of the American linguist William Labov, who studied language change in its social context. Based in part on the research of Meillet (1921) and Weinreich (1953),² Labov’s study (1976, 2001 inter alia) was one of the first to analyse the relationship between linguistic change and social change. He posited that when explaining the evolution of a language, it is not enough to scrutinize the (internal) linguistic structure, and that the (external) social structure must also be studied.

In the 1990s, historical sociolinguistics denied the segregation of the internal history of the language (that is, the evolution of its phonology, morphology, and so on) from its external or sociolinguistic history (that is, the evolution of the relationship between a speech community and its language), showing that one can weigh heavily on the evolution of the other and that the history of languages is strongly linked to the history of peoples (Lodge, 1993).

The last hypothesis in this book refers to the necessity of integrating synchronic tools into diachronic research. Defying Saussure’s tradition,³ which distinguished synchronic linguistics (the study of a language in its state at a given time), from diachronic linguistics (that is, its evolution), this book argues that while synchronic linguistics research can be carried out without reference to diachronic aspects, diachronic research must presuppose synchronic linguistics.⁴ Thus, it does not seem possible to conduct diachronic research of regional languages in France without preparatory work on the current analytical instruments and means of validation of synchronic linguistics.

The methodological basis of this position is located in one of the basic assumptions of modern linguistics, which is that human languages share a large number of universal properties and it is unlikely that a language would develop ‘by accident’. In other words, the evolution of a language is not arbitrary, and every language change must meet an essential need of the language or of its speech community.

What profoundly affects the research in this book was described by Labov (2001) as the ‘embedding problem’. This problem, which is central to determining the result of a language change, concerns the impact of the change on the entire linguistic system (both the internal linguistic structure and the external social structure). However, a general view of the majority of current sociolinguistic research in the field of regional languages reveals that they mostly focus on the synchronic aspects of the problem and do not deal with its diachronic aspects. Works affecting the historical aspect of the phenomenon seem marginal and neglected, and historical contacts between languages are routinely sidelined.

Moreover, in the specific case of the history of regional languages in France, the tendency has always been to describe the development of each language as a special case, without revealing commonalities. As already noted, the purpose of this book is to consider the presence of language contact of regional languages in France with French as systematic and continuous, and to detect similarities in the history of these languages in the specific period analysed in this research.

In sum, to present a somewhat different picture of what is already known about regional languages during World War II, the challenge of this book is to validate a set of diachronic language contacts with some synchronic methodologies proposed by linguists, sociolinguists, historians and sociologists. Subsequently, it would be interesting to apply some synchronic methods to diachronic aspects related to regional languages and their socio-political effects on members of their speech community in this same period.

1.2.4 Basic concepts

Since the interest of this book is in a particular research area of historical sociolinguistics, namely the regional language policies in France during World War II, it would be useful to define some basic notions relative to this topic, such as the terms regional language, language minority, bilingualism, diglossia and language policy.

The heritage languages of France are today designated by the more politically correct term ‘regional languages’ (in French: langues régionales), as opposed to popular denigrating terms such as ‘patois’ (Nolan, 2011, p. 93). Yet even this designation has led to discussion in recent years, particularly among those who are engaged in the defence and the promotion of these languages. They argue that these languages are not just regional entities – the term regional pointing to a geographical unit – but rather, they are symbols and a means of identity. To name them ‘regional’ is to deny them their full rights and their full scope. However, this book uses the term ‘regional’ to qualify and differentiate those languages of France whose characteristics are that they have been spoken on a portion of the national territory far longer than French, they were not recognized by the state, and they have been dominated (or rather, marginalized) by the official language (Sibille, 2000).

Accordingly, ‘language minorities’ are speech communities in their own right and are often ethnic communities, although in France it is impossible to establish ‘pure’ racial origins or ‘pure’ ethnic links (Ager, 1996, p. 24). Language minorities can be viewed as complex interactional networks marked by the use of linguistic codes (in our case, regional languages) different from the ones used by the surrounding society (in our case, French). In the specific context of this book, regional language minorities in France are indigenous to the country and therefore have an established regional and territorial base. However, they are also characterized by a remarkable level of diversity...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• 1 Introduction
• 2 History of ‘Top-Down’ Policy towards Regional Languages in France
• 3 Brittany
• 4 Southern France
• 5 Corsica
• 6 Alsace
• 7 Evaluation and Assessment of Regional Language Policies and Regionalist Movements in France during World War II
• 8 From Exclusion to Inclusion? The Post-War Effects on Regional Languages in France
• 9 Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index