Here's the state of language legislation in France at the moment.
It seems a bit extreme to me, because I really don't think that French is in any danger of being replaced by English, now or in the foreseeable future. I wouldn't want my government telling me how to speak and write, which is why I don't care for the English as the official language legislation that is afoot here in the States either. (Here's a good set of links for those curious about US language politics.) It's ironic that a Canadian-Japanese immigrant linguist turned senator was involved.
Notre définition de la langue suppose que nous en écartons tout ce qui est étranger à son organisme, à son système, en un mot tout ce qu'on désigne par le terme de linguistique externe Cette linguistique-là s'occupe pourtant de choses importantes, et c'est surtout à elles que l'on pense quand on aborde l'étude du langage.
Ce sont d'abord tous les points par lesquels la linguistique touche à ethnologie …
En second lieu, il faut mentionner les raltions existant entre la langue et l'histoire politique …
Ceci nous amène à un troisième point: les rapportes de la langue avec des institutions de toute sorte, l'Église, l'école, etc. Celles-ci, á leur tour, son intimement liées avec le développement littéraire d'une langue, phénoméne d'autant plus général qu'il est lui-même inséperable de l'histoire politique. La langue littéraire dépasse de toutes parts les limites que semble lui tracer la littérature; qu'on pense à l'influence des salons, de la cour, des académies. D'autre part elle pose la grosse question du conflit qui s'élève entre elle et les dialectes locaux; le linguiste doit aussi examiner les rapports réciproques de la langue littéraire, produit de la culture, arrive à détacher sa sphère d'existence de la sphère naturelle, celle de la langue parlée.
[Ferdinand de Saussure. 1915. Cours de linguistique générale, introduction, chapitre 5]
Translation [Wade Baskin]:
Posted by jim at June 30, 2003 10:19 AMMy definition of language pressuposes the exclusion of everything that is outside its organism or system — in a word, of everthing known as "external linguistics." But external linguistics deals with many important things — the very ones that we think of when we begin the study of speech.
First and foremost come all the points where linguistics borders on ethnology …
Second come the relations between language and political history …
Here we come to a third point: the relations between languages and all sorts of institutions (the Church, the school, etc.). All these institutions in turn are closely tied to the literary development of a language, a general phenomenon that is all the more inseparable from political history. At every point the literary language oversteps the boundaries that literature apparently marks off; we need only consider the influence of salons, the court, and national academies. Moreover, the literary language raises the important questions of conflicts between it and the local dialects; the linguist must also examine the reciprical relations of book language and the vernacular; for every literary language, being the product of the culture, finally breaks away from its natural sphere, the spoken language.
I agree that the French are over-reacting. Some of my friends and colleagues in Paris refer to the 'loi Toubon' as 'tout mal', but, on a more serious note, the French political class has never accepted the emergence of English as a dominant diplomatic and commercial (let alone cultural) language. Furthermore, the French government is spending considerable sums of money to support the French Web or the "Toile Francophone". To my mind, it is a misguided and a lost cause.
The questions concerning nationalism and linguistic identity are very complex and the French case is symptomatic of a number of societies struggling with maintaining or preserving an 'idée reçue' of Tradition. Food for thought.
The identification of language and ethnicity / nationality is one of the more pernicious memes to come along and infect linguists and others.
Posted by: jim on June 30, 2003 05:12 PM