6 - Language: divisions and debates

Summary

A crumbling monolith?

Issues relating to language have been debated in Francophone culture ever since French replaced Latin in the sixteenth century as the dominant medium for writing. But the nature of the debates, and the assumptions underlying them, have evolved markedly over the centuries, reflecting the fortunes of the language itself. This chapter will mainly be devoted to presenting a picture of twentieth-century tendencies and the controversies accompanying them. Particularly relevant is the most recent change to affect French speakers' linguistic beliefs and attitudes: since the Second World War especially, confidence and optimism about the state of the language and its prospects have tended to give way to uncertainty and even pessimism. Partly as a consequence, traditional norms and practices are nowadays increasingly liable to be challenged and even disregarded.

The erstwhile mood of confidence set in three-and-a-half centuries ago, when the speech of the royal Court was gradually established as the cultivated standard - essentially the formal written French of today. Seventeenth-century grammarians prided themselves on creating a new and perfected language: 'worthy of the greatest monarch on earth', as one of them put it (in a reference to Louis XIV). Far from adopting a conservative, backward-looking perspective, theirs was an innovative approach, and they made a particular point of distancing themselves from the chaoti cusage of the sixteenth century, dismissing it contemptuously, though quite inappropriately, as le gaulois ('ancient Gaulish').