14 - Sociolinguistic variation and the linguist

Summary

Introduction

Although we know that a thousand years ago when Hugues Capet was elected king of France (987), ‘French’, the vernacular of the Ile de France was only one dialect among many and remained so for centuries, French is undeniably the language of most people living in France today and in many francophone countries throughout the world. The various coups de force which have led to the imposition of French as a national language in France and elsewhere have been well documented in a variety of works and will not be discussed here (cf. Balibar and Laporte 1974, Vermes and Boutet 1987). Whether royal or republican, the agents of the state (the schools, the universities, the law, the police, the army), supported by strata of the local populations wishing to increase their social and economic standing, have successfully completed their task. We speak of ‘success’ here in the sense that, despite many repressive measures which have led to this situation, the vast majority of citizens in ‘hexagonal’ France at least would unhesitatingly describe French as their mother tongue.

A component of this spread of French is the belief in the unity of the language. This belief is carefully nurtured by what I called above the ‘agents’ of the state.