Lenga Nòstra?: Local Discourses on Occitan Revitalization in Southwestern France
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Lenga nòstra?: Local Discourses on Occitan Revitalization in Southwestern France By Elyse A. Ritchey A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Romance Languages and Literatures in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in Charge: Professor Mairi McLaughlin, Chair Professor Richard Kern Professor Emerita Leanne Hinton Fall 2019 Lenga nòstra?: Local Discourses on Occitan in Southwestern France Copyright 2019 By Elyse A. Ritchey !1 Abstract Lenga nòstra?: Local Discourses on Occitan in Southwestern France by Elyse Anne Ritchey Doctor of Philosophy in Romance Languages and Literatures University of California, Berkeley Professor Mairi McLaughlin, Chair Use of the Occitan language in southern France has steadily declined over the past eight centuries, as part of a societal shift toward French. This shift has culminated in the current endangerment of Occitan (UNESCO, Ethnologue). Native speakers are aging rapidly, and according to some estimates, the language will disappear by the end of the 21st century (Bernissan 2012, Kranzer 2015). Contemporary efforts to revitalize Occitan have been well received. Whereas the language was once an obstacle to the acquisition of French and denigrated as a patois, it now carries widely recognized cultural cachet (Martel 2013). Previous studies on Occitan have centered on language attitudes (Paulston 1994, Priest 2008, Joubert 2010), on ideological clashes between groups of different speakers (Blanchet 1992, Sumien 2006, Costa 2016, Escudé 2009), and on the presence of Occitan within particular spheres like education (Boyer 2009, Costa 2015) and the media (Alén-Garabato 2011, Hagège 2015). At present, there is a lack of research into the social, historical, and political factors that affect Occitan revitalization efforts on the local level. This study aims to address these factors by analyzing public discourses on Occitan circulating in two small communities in southwestern France, Carmaux and Villefranche-de-Rouergue. These towns are both located in rural areas, where contemporary society is troubled by economic transformation, an aging population, and the pressures of globalization. The study is an in-depth analysis of contemporary texts drawn from three sources of public discourse: the press, government documents, and documents circulated by associations promoting the Occitan language. Such public discourses both reflect and shape social attitudes and practices. Thus, the representations of Occitan that appear in the corpus allow me to analyze the role that it plays in each community. The three research questions that guide the study are as follows: 1. How is Occitan portrayed in public discourse in Carmaux and Villefranche-de- Rouergue? !2 2. What is Occitan’s role in local society, as evidenced in in public discourse in Carmaux and Villefranche-de-Rouergue? 3. In what domains of language use is Occitan portrayed as being present, according to public discourse in Carmaux and Villefranche-de-Rouergue? In order to address the questions, I use a purpose-built corpus of public discourses, gathered during a fieldwork period at the two research sites. In order to analyze these texts, I employ a methodology adapted from Reisigl and Wodak’s Discourse-historical approach (2009). Analysis related to the first research question indicates that explicit portrayals of Occitan are largely positive. I find that three Discourses predominate such depictions. The first insists on the aesthetic, emotional, and social value of Occitan. The second casts Occitan as a valuable part of the community. The third insists on Occitan’s role as a link with history, culture, and tradition. All three of them combine to create the impression that Occitan is vital to the community. This finding contrasts interestingly with analysis related to the second question, which finds that Occitan is highly restricted to a set of creative cultural practices that serve to reinforce a larger Occitan regional identity, not necessarily the local character of the town. Therefore, it appears that the limited presence of Occitan in the community is at odds with assertions of its vitality and relevance that appear in the corpus. Finally, analysis of the third research question shows that Occitan is represented as being marginally present or completely absent from all major domains of language use, save that of secular society. Most manifestations of Occitan are facilitated by language promotion and other civil society associations, and are related to cultural events. Thus, I conclude that the function of Occitan in Villefranche-de-Rouergue and Carmaux, as represented in the study corpus, is to facilitate community engagement and local identity, with emphasis on expansion of language use as a lower priority. This study suggests that Occitan is undergoing a process of language revalorization and being refashioned as a marker of community belonging in Villefranche-de-Rouergue and Carmaux (Beier and Michael 2018, Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer 1998). Previous studies have also remarked on the lack of dynamism and language acquisition in Occitan as a consequence of a lack of nationalism (Paulston 1994), being limited to ideology (Costa 2016), and failing to break free of state language ideology (Escude 2009). However, I propose that Occitan revitalization is best viewed as a community revitalization project that privileges traditional cultural and linguistic practices that emphasize conviviality and creativity as a response to modern social pressures. !i Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction x Prologue: Winter x Occitan and the community xii Rural France today xii Consequences of language shift in rural France xiv Regional languages and the French state xvi Language revitalization movements xvi Making the case: Language revitalization discourses xix Structure and aims of the study xx Chapter One: Literature Review 1 1.1 Language shift 1 1.2 Language maintenance 4 1.3 Language endangerment 5 1.3.1 Language and culture in language endangerment 7 1.3.2 Domains of language use and the evaluation of language endangerment 8 1.4 Language revitalization 9 1.4.1 Metrics of language endangerment and revitalization 11 1.5 Language revitalization in practice: The role of language planning and policy 13 1.6 Language activism and language activists 15 1.7 Language attitudes and language ideology 17 1.7.1 Language ideology and discourse 18 1.7.2 Language and the imagined community 20 1.7.3 Boundary maintenance 21 1.8 Language prestige and language revitalization 23 1.8.1 Language prestige and cultural revitalization 25 1.10 Previous research on Occitan 27 1.11 Research aims 29 Chapter Two: Methodology 31 !ii 2.1 Methodological approach 31 2.1.1 Quantitative approach: Corpus linguistics 32 2.1.2 Qualitative approach: Discourse analysis 32 2.1.3 A complementary approach: Corpus linguistics and discourse analysis 33 2.2 The discourse-historical approach 35 2.2.3 Structure of the discourse-historical approach 37 2.3 Semantic preference, semantic prosody, and semantic fields 39 2.4 Corpus design 40 2.4.1 Press 41 2.4.1.1 Collection of press data 42 2.4.2 Government 44 2.4.2.1 Collection of government data 45 2.4.3 Language associations (LPAs) 46 2.4.3.1 Collection of language promotion association data 47 2.4.4 Connections between text types 47 2.5 Corpus building: Language naming in southern France 48 2.5.1 Selection of texts through search terms 49 2.5.2 Sample construction 49 2.5.3 Pilot study 50 2.6 Discourse-historical analysis 51 2.6.1 Analysis of predication strategies: Nominal forms of occitan* 53 2.6.1.1 Syntax of (l’)occitan 53 2.6.1.2 Syntactic category: Subject 54 2.6.1.3 Syntactic category: Adverbial phrase without preposition 54 2.6.1.4 Syntactic category: Constituent of a verb phrase 55 2.6.1.5 Syntactic category: Constituent of a prepositional phrase 55 2.6.1.6 Syntactic category: Appositive 55 2.6.2 Analysis of predication strategies: Linguistic devices modifying (l’)occitan 56 2.6.2.1 Attributive adjective 56 2.6.2.2 Predicative adjective 56 2.6.2.3 Predicative noun 57 !iii 2.6.2.4 Apposition 57 2.6.3 Derived noun / NP 58 2.6.4 Analysis of nomination strategies: occitan* as modifier 58 2.6.4.2 Syntactic category: Attributive adjective 60 2.6.4.3 Syntactic category: Predicative adjective 60 2.6.4.4 Syntactic category: Prepositional phrase en occitan 61 2.6.5 Adjectives derived from occitan 63 2.7 Domains of language use 64 2.8 Research questions 66 2.8.1 Research question 1 66 2.8.1.1 Research question 1: Quantitative analysis 66 2.8.1.2 Research question 1: Qualitative analysis 67 2.8.2 Research question 2 67 2.8.2.1 Research question 2: Quantitative analysis 68 2.8.2.2 Research question 2: Qualitative analysis 68 2.8.3 Research question 3 69 2.8.3.1 Research question 3: Quantitative analysis 69 2.8.3.2 Research question 3: Qualitative analysis 69 2.9 Limitations 69 Chapter Three: Research sites and historical context 71 3.1 Introduction 71 3.2 Language in France 71 3.2.1 Linguistic history of France 71 3.2.2 Language ideology in France 75 3.3 Language in Languedoc 78 3.3.1 Linguistic history of Languedoc 78 3.3.2 Language ideology in Languedoc 85 3.4 Carmaux and Villefranche-de-Rouergue 90 3.4.1 Carmaux 90 3.4.2 Villefranche-de-Rouergue 92 3.4.3 Research sites in context 95 iv! Chapter Four: Overview of the corpus and qualitative analysis of predication strategies 96 4.1 Introduction 96 4.2 Quantitative analysis: Nomination and predication 97