Re: Of accents & dialects

Selon R A Brown <ray@...>:

>
>  > geographically variable and
>  > subjective.  Before sound recording and
>  > phonetic script it was literally harder to
>  > codify pronunciation.
>
> The French managed it fairly well - much better than the proponents of
> RP ever did in Britain. But, of course, they had their Acad�mie
> Fran�aise to lay down the law on such things - English has never had any
> comparably authoritative body.
>
Well, you have to realise that the French government had to do much more than
that to get the will of the Acad�mie become law. And most of what was done was
basically state persecution of minorities (in the name of Equality. Bah!).

First, teachers were trained in universities tightly controlled by the ministry
of Education (mostly in Paris). Every teacher had to get their diploma from
there, even private school teachers (controls were, and still are, quite severe
in private schools).

Second, school teachers were for a long time unable to choose where they would
teach. The ministry of Education basically chose a location for them, and they
just had to obey and go there. By ensuring that rural areas only got teachers
coming from urban areas usually from the other side of France, they ensured that
children would get a teacher that wouldn't know their native dialect.

Third, a whole culture of denigration of local dialects was engineered from
Paris, mostly by simply denying their existence. There were no dialects, only
ill-spoken forms of the Holy French language that could only be mocked. If you
spoke a dialect, it was simply because you were too stupid to speak the correct
French language. Adults found themselves unable to get anything done by the
omnipresent French administration if they weren't able to write letters in
Academic French (French civil servants were instructed to not help people who
couldn't express themselves in "proper" French). Children were taught that the
language their parents spoke was primitive and incorrect, and were severely
punished if they ever spoke it at school (bodily punishments were considered
very normal at that time).

By maintaining a tight centralised control on education, and continuing this
policy of persecuting speakers of non-standard French for more than a century
and a half, France managed to destroy all French dialects, and nearly managed to
do the same with the other languages spoken in France. Only at the very borders
of the country some dialectical variations and separate languages managed to
survive, and in areas of strong regional identity that wouldn't let themselves
be subdued by Paris (like Brittany and Corsica, although even there the central
government managed to impose standard French as the main spoken language).

Even today, the position of the French government on regional languages is
ambiguous. They don't dare to move explicitly to destroy them any longer, but
they refuse to give them the status and protection that the European Union asks
member states to give them.

So you see, it's not that easy to destroy the dialectical variation within a
language. One needs serious human right breaking to achieve it. And even then,
France hasn't managed to get rid of all regional accents, although those only
survive in very rural areas and border regions, especially in the South.
--
Christophe Grandsire-Koevoets.

http://christophoronomicon.blogspot.com
http://www.christophoronomicon.nl

It takes a straight mind to create a twisted conlang.

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