Evaluation and Assessment of Regional Language Policies and Regionalist Movements in France during World War II

Abstract

In this book, we show how regionalist movements in France during the interwar period and World War II attempted to implement ‘bottom-up’ language policies to elevate their lowly regional idioms from primarily or exclusively peasant use to the status of an ‘authorized language’.¹ These movements, led mostly by intellectuals, formed their own literary and scientific societies and were generally engaged in several categories of activity, such as the standardization of the regional language (orthographic reform, mapping…); its introduction in schools; its inclusion in the media, and the expansion of the language to literary domains.