A history of the rise of the French language?

Dostoevsky

While reading Eric Hobsbawn's Nations and Nationalism this section jumped out:

'In this sense French was essential to the concept of France, even though in 1789 50% of Frenchmen did not speak it at all, only 12-13% spoke it "correctly" - and indeed outside a central region it was not habitually spoken even in the area of the labgue d'oui, except in towns, and then not always in their suburbs. In northern and southern France virtually nobody talked French.' (p. 60, here.)


Michael Grenfell notes:

'A linguistic survey carried out by the abbé Henri Grégoire in 1790 revealed that over 30 'patois' were spoken in France (for political reasons, he was reluctant to accord them the status of languages; see below). More pertinently perhaps, he concluded that as few as three million people - not more than a tenth of the population - could actually speak French with any degree of fluency (Johnson 1993).'
( Michael Grenfell, Bourdieu, Language and Linguistics, p. 155)

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I find this information to be amazing. I had known vaguely about state actions against Breton, but never realised that French itself was such a minority language. Grenfell cites a Douglas Johnson article from 1993 above. It's called 'The Making of the French Nation' and is in a collection named The National Question in Europe in Historical Context (Cambridge, 1993). It can be read on Google Books here.

Other than this, would anybody have recommendations for a history in English which traces the rise of French in the past number of centuries and how it interacted with those languages across France?

Thank you.

ValerieR

That is very interesting. I wasn't fully aware that the French language was such a 'recent' one, considering. I knew about the "Langue d'Oil" in the North and the "Langue d'Oc" in the South.
Just found this website which could be of interest re. all the 'patois' throughout France (The links seem to be all in French though). I shall be exploring it tomorrow as it looks rather interesting.

Valerie

franc 91

If you go to the home page of Lexilogos you can click onto English if you want to explore individual languages including regional French ones. As I mentioned elsewhere on the Forum, the 1914-18 War brought death and destruction to many speakers of these languages. I remember being told that when there were still conscripts in the French Army (up until the 70's), those who were from Alsace were commanded by officers from that region for linguistic reasons. There was a famous (or infamous) story from I think it was Napoleonic times when a general came to inspect a Breton regiment and asked what they wanted to do. Once the question was translated to them, they all shouted -(We want to go) home! which to the general's ears conveniantly sounded like 'à la guerre'. I can also tell you that in the 19th century when the railways opened up the country, many people from the provinces settled in Paris bringing their language and customs with them. There were parts of Paris where for example they spoke the Auvergnat variety of Occitan and on Saturday nights they danced la bourrée to the sound of the cabrette. This meant that there was a to and fro influence on traditional music and instrument making between Paris and the Auvergne. In Montparnasse the arrival of the Bretons transformed that part of Paris. One piece of Parisian argot is the verb - baragouiner - which comes from the question - qu'est-ce qu'il baraguine? (what's he saying?) - a Breton-speaker getting off the train at Montparnasse would go into a café and ask for bread and wine - bara ha gwin which of course the Parisian barman didn't understand.