Abstract
This chapter presents Kroch’s (1978) model of language variation (Sect. 1.1), which links maintenance of conservative speech norms with resistance by elite groups to ‘natural’ phonetic change. The model recalls the ‘least effort principle’ (principe du moindre effort) which underpins a number of twentieth-century studies of français populaire, or working-class French (Sect. 1.2). With reference to the work of the Milroys, Lodge and Bourdieu, the notion of ‘Ideology of the Standard’ is set out in Sect. 1.3, before a plan of this volume in Sect. 1.4.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
The term ‘loi du moindre effort’ in the context of the French language appears to have been first used in a little-known article by Léon Bollack (1903; see Hornsby and Jones 2006), who identifies simplifying tendencies with ‘éléments transformistes’ destined to overcome the conservatism of standard French (in similar vein, Frei 1929 would see non-standard French as ‘français avancé’, heralding the standard language of the future). Bollack’s focus, however, was on writing rather than speech, and his use of the term is not linked to social class or ideology.
- 3.
And, by extension, francophone France more generally: ‘le français populaire de Paris est, avec quelques différences sans grande importance, le français populaire de toute la France, de la France, du moins, qui parle français’ (Bauche 1920: 183).
- 4.
Cf. Klinkenberg (1992: 42) ‘le français offre sans doute l’exemple le plus poussé qui soit de centralisme et d’institutionalisation linguistique’. The opening chapter of L.C. Harmer’s The French Language (1954) is appropriately entitled ‘A Nation of Grammarians’, a label attributed to Duhamel (1944: 50).
- 5.
Cf. Kroch (1978: 30):
The influence of the literary language on the spoken standard is one manifestation among others of a socially motivated inhibition of linguistic change. This conclusion is reinforced by the fact that prestige dialects not only inhibit changes that violate written forms but also resist changes in such features as vowel quality long before those changes would cause noticeable contradictions between the written and the spoken forms.
- 6.
The widely-held belief that ‘correct’ French is to be equated with its written form is neatly illustrated by a hypercorrection, and a purist response to it. In Etiemble’s famous (1964) broadside against Anglo-American loanwords, Parlez-vous franglais?, the singer Dalida is quoted as having said ‘je n’en ai pas prises
’ during a television interview, in what appears to have been an unsuccessful attempt to make a past participle agreement. Rather than comment on the inappropriateness to speech of what is essentially an arcane orthographical rule, formally inculcated through years of daily school dictées but rarely mastered by French native speakers, Etiemble (p. 282) excoriates this non-native French speaker for ‘une belle grosse faute contre notre syntaxe’. That a man of the left, and a champion of French independence from US capitalism, should find himself judging a relatively uneducated immigrant by the exacting orthographic standards of a privileged class does not appear to have been viewed at the time as in any way incongruous. - 7.
Ball (1997: 191-92) lists some of the more vitriolic responses to the proposed 1990 spelling reforms, which included the following from Yves Berger in the November 1990 edition of Lire: ‘Stupide, inutile, dangeureuse : c’est une entreprise qui relève de la pure démagogie, de l’esprit de Saddam Hussein’.
- 8.
Gueunier et al. (1978) contrast attitudes among speakers in Tours, a city traditionally associated with ‘good’ French, with those observed in areas of linguistic insecurity such as Lille, where a working-class male informant bemoaned his own perceived inability to speak his native language (p.157):
Nous, les gars du Nord, on fout des coups de pied à la France … s’appliquer, on peut y arriver, mais..on arrivera jamais à parler français, c’est pas vrai! … Je pourrais aller à l’école pendant dix ans, ben j’arriverais jamais à parler le français.
- 9.
Citing the example of the French vowel system, which has undergone significant simplification from twelve to seven oral vowels, Armstrong and Mackenzie (2012: 19) link social distinction to maintenance of a conservative written standard, a theme we develop below:
The elements in the maximal twelve-vowel system, redundant in this linguistically functional view, continue however to serve a sociolinguistic purpose, as indeed is typical generally of ‘conservative’ elements in a linguistic system. This is facilitated in part by the fact that the functionally redundant elements in the twelve-vowel system have orthographic correlates, which are not equally accessible to all speakers.
- 10.
For a discussion of the diglossia hypothesis with respect to variable liaison, see Hornsby (2019).
- 11.
Cited in ‘L’orthographe : histoire d’une longue querelle’: http://www.academie-francaise.fr/lorthographe-histoire-dune-longue-querelle (accessed 22.2.2020).
- 12.
Cf. Bourdieu (1982: 42; fn. 18):
Seul le facultatif peut donner lieu à des effets de distinction. Comme le montre Pierre Encrevé, dans le cas des liaisons catégoriques, qui sont toujours observées par tous, y compris dans les classes populaires, il n’y a pas de place pour le jeu. Lorsque les contraintes structurales de la langue se trouvent suspendues, avec les liaisons facultatives, le jeu réapparaît, avec les effets de distinction corrélatifs.
- 13.
Passy appears to suggest here that cuir and velours refer to false liaison involving [z] and [t] respectively. General usage has, however, settled on velours for [z] and cuir for [t].
’ during a television interview, in what appears to have been an unsuccessful attempt to make a past participle agreement. Rather than comment on the inappropriateness to speech of what is essentially an arcane orthographical rule, formally inculcated through years of daily school dictées but rarely mastered by French native speakers, Etiemble (p. 282) excoriates this non-native French speaker for ‘une belle grosse faute contre notre syntaxe’. That a man of the left, and a champion of French independence from US capitalism, should find himself judging a relatively uneducated immigrant by the exacting orthographic standards of a privileged class does not appear to have been viewed at the time as in any way incongruous.References
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Hornsby, D. (2020). Ideology and Language Change. In: Norm and Ideology in Spoken French. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49300-4_1
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