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Introduction French Language(S) in Contact Worldwide

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Introduction French Language(S) in Contact Worldwide journal of language contact 7 (2014) 3-35 brill.com/jlc Introduction ∵ French Language(s) in Contact Worldwide History, Space, System, and other Ecological Parameters Françoise Gadet Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense & CNRS MoDyCo [email protected] Ralph Ludwig Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg [email protected] Abstract The awareness of language that culminated in France with the French Revolution has remained dominant till the present day: a nation une et indivisible corresponds to a concept of the national language as a homogenous entity, self-sufficient and free from outside and dialectal influences. This conception is contradicted by two historical facts, however. Firstly, various waves of language contact were constitutive of the emergence and development of the French language from the very beginning. Secondly, a new structure of varieties developed through the colonial expansion of France outside Europe, in which many forms of language contact are of significant importance. The best way to capture this diversity adequately is to adhere to a broadly ecological approach (linguistic ecology) that takes into account various parameters, such as history, social context, competence, and universals. This is demonstrated with samples of transcribed speech from Togo, Guadeloupe and Nova Scotia. The linguistic ecology approach is the guiding principle of all the articles in this volume. * The authors would especially like to thank France Martineau and Steve Pagel for their in- sightful remarks and stimulating discussions. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2014 | doi 10.1163/19552629-00701002Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 07:40:16AM via free access <UN> 4 Gadet and Ludwig Keywords francophonia discontinua – ecology – Togo – Guadeloupe – Nova Scotia – Ewe – Creole – English The often complex history of the French language worldwide has given rise to a great diversity of vernaculars all around the world, in what could be called (following the tradition for English) “colonial French” or “post-colonial French”, i.e. French as it is spoken in every territory beyond the original European ones – “le berceau”. The diversity of French1 today is the result of complex eco- logical factors, events and processes, concerning its history and more particu- larly its contacts. The various types of contact with languages of different types, the relationships to standardisation and norms, and the degree of vita- lity (several Francophone situations are today obsolescent or close to attrition) are to be considered in relation to the consequences of two historical peculia- rities: colonial expansion during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries (mainly in America first and then in Africa); and the effects of normative pressures in France itself after the high time of standardisation in the 17th century. French is therefore of great interest for general linguistics due to the diversity its vernaculars offer, fanning out as far as creole languages: French-based creoles are among the most widespread, and belong to two different geographic areas. There are many different ways of speaking French, and this gives it its impor- tance, more than its number of speakers, which remains modest: with roughly 90 million L1 speakers, together with about 20 million L2 speakers, French is usually ranked the 11th or 12th most spoken language in the world; English, by comparison, is probably the second (after Chinese) or the third (after Spanish). The French language appears to be the outcome of manifold language contacts and continues to be involved in contacts with a wide range of lan- guages worldwide. The attitudes and linguistic competence of French speakers in our modern world are the product of a long history of French language contact and can only be understood with such a background in mind. That is why this introduction will start by characterising what we call “Francophonia discontinua”, in a brief recap of the contact history of French in France and worldwide, and a review of the main corpora available (Part 1). Part 2 will present the analytical framework used to encompass the several factors 1 Unfortunately, the term “Frenches”, by analogy with “Englishes” to convey a pluralistic conception of the language, does not exist. But we mean here a plural when using the word “French” for the language. journal of languageDownloaded contact from Brill.com10/02/2021 7 (2014) 3-35 07:40:16AM via free access <UN> Introduction 5 for studying the ecology of present-day French worldwide. Part 3 presents three exemplary cases chosen among the (very numerous) situations not illus- trated otherwise in this issue: based on fine-grained corpus approaches, these cases provide insight into the complexity of Francophone situations. Finally Part 4 is a presentation of the global project and of the five articles of this issue of Journal of Language Contact. 1 French Language: Francophonia discontinua and the Role of Contact 1.1 Language Contact as Midwife for the French Language The history of French in France itself can be looked at as a long and constant history of different kinds of contacts.2 It is common knowledge that French developed from an oral variety of Latin spoken in Gaul. When Caesar conquered the Celts between 58 and 51 BCE his soldiers spoke a variety of Latin in different guises. This basic variety of modern Romance met with a Celtic substratum and absorbed, in particular, lexical traces of the Celtic language. New dominant constellations in language contact resulted from the collapse of the Roman Empire as a consequence of the German invasions. The Franks left the most lasting superstratum traces, accor- ding to Wartburg’s theory (1946 / 1971). These early centuries of Romance and French language history were characterised by social processes of “colonisation“ and “migration“; and on the linguistic level by “language contact”, “dominance of orality”, “demarcation” (sometimes referred to as “simplification” – see below Part 2.1.), such that the concept of “creolisation” has been put forward as a cen- tral hypothesis for describing the emergence of the Romance languages (see in particular a discussion in Schlieben-Lange, 1977; also Mufwene, 2001, 2008). In this context the statement that Roman colonisation led in general to the development of a “Romania discontinua” is also relevant. This term refers to the formation of a linguistic and cultural area which was not completely co- herent geographically – Greece was not linguistically Romanised, the Mediterranean area was a language threshold, and Dacia, a province colonised after 106 CE, was separated by a linguistic-cultural corridor. Amado Alonso, who introduced the term Romania Continua, considered that geographical 2 See in particular Amit (2013). It is also a major theme in the influential book by Lodge (1993) and such a stance appears to be among the objectives of Kremnitz (2013) for France within and beyond the Hexagon, as well as of Pöll (2001) for French outside France. Such ways of looking at French are not (not yet?) the mainstream perspective for considering this language. journal of language contact 7 (2014) 3-35 Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 07:40:16AM via free access <UN> 6 Gadet and Ludwig proximity played an important role in the development of a common language type. At the same time he placed French close to Romanian typologically, al- though isolated in terms of language geography, since he (like Wartburg) consi- dered French as a “hybrid language” (his words) that achieved a particular status through the strong influence of language contact.3 The first coherent French text, the Oaths of Strasbourg (842), displays the occasional influence of written Latin alongside central French grammatical features and could therefore be said to be “hybrid”. As French became esta- blished as a written language soon after the turn of the millennium and eman- cipated itself from the diglossic role of the Low Variety with respect to Latin, it incorporated many “copies”4 from Latin, and then from Italian. Many French people are probably not aware of the fact that basic terms such as “chiffre”, “sucre” or “jupe” come from Arabic, transmitted through Moorish Spanish.5 French also acts as a “donor language”. The Anglo-Norman dialect which invaded England with William the Conqueror in 1066 was widespread in the English upper class by the 14th century, and bequeathed a number of lexical 3 Cf. Alonso (1945 / 1952: 118 s.): “El francés actual, con su carácter tan apartadizo de los otros idiomas románicos, es, pues, el resultado de una doble hibridación eficaz: la una, la acción del sustrato céltico, más triunfante que en ninguna otra región románica; la otra, la acción del superstrato franco, incomparablemente más persistente que la de ningún otro supers- trato germánico. […] el francés, nacido en territorio galo nunca bien latinizado y luego ger- manizado más intensamente que ninguna otra región del imperio, es un idioma de mestizaje […].” And: “[…] dentro de la Romania continua el francés resulta inagrupable” (ibid.: 126). “Present-day French, with its very different character from the other Romance languages, is thus the outcome of a double efficient hybridization: on the one hand the influence of the Celtic substrate, which is more prevalent here than in any other Romance area, and on the other hand the influence of a Frankish superstratum, which is incomparably more lasting than for any other Germanic superstratum. […] French, born in Gaul, a territory that was never entirely Latinized and was more intensively Germanized than any other area in the empire, is a mixed language.” And: “Within Romania continua French turns out to be unclas- sifiable.” Of course today Alonso’s classification is not defensible as such. Still, two points re- main worthy of consideration: the importance of language contact in the development of French, and the fact that isolated language areas might be more accessible to contact in- fluences (as is the case for Romanian).
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