Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-19673-4 - A Reference Grammar of French R. E. Batchelor Excerpt More information Brief introduction to the French language (with reference to the French of francophone countries) / Br`eve introduction a` la langue franc¸aise (avec r´ef´erence au franc¸ais des pays francophones) French is the official language of twenty-nine independent states and is spoken, to a greater or lesser extent, in fifty-one or fifty-two countries.1 Most recent calculations suggest that over 200 million use it as a first or second language. Although not as diffuse as English, but certainly more so than Spanish, since it enjoys currency on five continents and Spanish 1 Henriette Walter suggests fifty-two in Le franc¸ais d’ici, de l`a, de l`a-bas (1998, p. 135). The figure 1 beside a country indicates the authors’ serious reservations about any validity over claims for francophonie for this country. The figure 2 beside a country indicates that French is spoken by a percentage of the population, and this could vary from country to country, who use it as a mother tongue, or as a major second language: Albanie 1, Belgique, Belgique (communaut´e francophone), B´enin, Brunswick 1, Bulgarie 1, Burkina Faso, Burundi 2, Cambodge 1, Canada: Nouveau, Cap-Vert 1, Centrafrique, Comores, Congo, Congo (R´epublique d´emocratique = RDC), Coteˆ d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Dominique 1, Egypte´ 1, France, Gabon, Guin´ee, Guin´ee-Bissau 1, Guin´ee Equatoriale,´ Ha¨ıti, Laos 1, Liban 2, Luxembourg, Mac´edoine 1, Madagascar, Mali, Maroc 2, Maurice, Mauritanie, Moldavie 1, Niger, Pologne 1, Roumanie 1, Rwanda 2, Sainte-Lucie 2, Sao˜ Tom´eetPrincipe1,S´en´egal, Seychelles 2, Suisse 2, Tchad, Togo, Tunisie 2, Vanuatu, Viˆetnam, Za¨ıre. There exists some residue of French in countries like Cambodia, Vietnam and Lebanon as a result of the French presence in their colonial past. Algeria provides an interesting case, since, following independence in 1962, French was disowned and, to some extent, replaced by its rival English, with the result that, since the 1980s, numerous Algerian students have pursued their university careers in the UK, USA and Canada, and not in France. Political choices are visible here. However, French has experienced a resurgence of interest, and one may calculate that 30 percent of Algerians speak and write French. Nevertheless, this list does not include the following, and there seems to be no understandable reason for this: Quebec, Guyana, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Monaco, Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, and Mayotte where French is an official language. This may well be because some of these countries, islands and territories form part of metropolitan France. One could also cite in this category characterized by French as an official language: the ˆIles Anglo-Normandes (Channel Islands), the Val d’Aoste (Aosta Valley) and Louisiane (Louisiana) in the USA. 1 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-19673-4 - A Reference Grammar of French R. E. Batchelor Excerpt More information 2 A Reference Grammar of French only on three (the Americas, Europe and restricted parts of West Africa), it provides a form of expression not only for France and peripheral countries, principalities or areas such as Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Andorra and Saarland, but also for numerous countries in sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa (most frequently called the Maghreb), for Quebec where 80 percent of the population speak French as their first language, the West Indies (notably Martinique and Guadeloupe), Guyana, Madagascar, Haiti, Tahiti, Reunion, Mauritius, parts of Louisiana, and New Caledonia. It still has some lingering cultural value in Vietnam and Cambodia, which formed part of the old French Indochina Empire. A global means of communication, it is therefore a language to be reckoned with. How did the French language acquire such a privileged and exalted posi- tion, having, like its sister Romance language Spanish, and the North European English language, both of which have challenged it over the centuries for primacy of place, set out on its universal path from rela- tively inauspicious beginnings? Its most distant source lies in the group of Indo-European, or Asian-European, languages which gave rise to Greek, then to Latin which splintered itself into the so-called Romance, or Neo- Latin, languages of French, Provenc¸al, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian. Each of these languages, or sublanguages, like Valencian (related to Castilian Spanish and very similar to Catalan), Corsican (related to Tuscany Italian) or Galician (which is very close to Portuguese), reflects the final development of Vulgar Latin, a popular and spoken form of Clas- sical Latin associated with Virgil, Caesar and Ovid. Vulgar Latin itself was the lingua franca spoken in different areas of the Roman Empire, and as this lingua franca slowly broke free from a central stem, it disintegrated and fol- lowed the disparate and diffuse paths of Roman administrators, colonists, soldiers and traders. All Romance languages are really the result of a kind of cr´eolisation (a linguistic process involving two separate communities, one of which is European), to use the current French term. As far as France is concerned, or Gaul as it was known in the early cen- turies of the Christian era, Vulgar Latin split into two main strands: langue d’o¨ıl in the north and langue d’oc in the south. Similar to the languages of Italy and Spain, the langue d’oc retained much of the sound system derived from Vulgar Latin and entrenched itself to the south of a line running approximately from Bordeaux in western France to Grenoble in the east. It maintained the Latin vowels intact to a large extent, while dropping conso- nants. A similar phenomenon occurred in Spain and Italy, especially in the latter where the modern Italian language is distinguished by the almost total disappearance of consonants from the end of all words, whether they be verbs (andare), nouns (ragazzo) or adjectives (inglese). With respect to the langue d’o¨ıl, and this is our chief interest, the first text that is clearly not Latin, but still in dialect form, is the Serments de Strasbourg (Strasbourg Oaths, 842). This composition of distinctly non-Latin includes not © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-19673-4 - A Reference Grammar of French R. E. Batchelor Excerpt More information Brief introduction to the French language 3 only the first piece of so-called French, in a dialect impossible to locate, but also the first piece of German, drawn up by Charles le Chauve (Charles the Bald) on the French side and Louis le Germanique (Louis the Germanic) on the German side, both committing themselves to an alliance against Lothaire I (Lothair), the Frankish emperor. However, the first recognizable literary creation in langue d’o¨ıl is La Cantil`ene or S´equence de Sainte Eulalie (880), which eulogizes in song the martyrdom of Saint Eulalia in Spain in approximately the year 304. The langue d’o¨ıl expanded rapidly outwards across northern France in the thirteenth century, having already started to gain ground on an interna- tional scale in the eleventh century with the successful invasion of England by William the Conqueror in 1066, and here French, with its wider admin- istrative functions, held sway in the courts of England until 1350, with the result that two languages cohabited in England for hundreds of years: French and Anglo-Saxon. The doublets beef (from French bœuf )andcow, pork (from French porc)andpig,andmutton (from French mouton)andsheep are pertinent illustrations of the two parallel languages in the England of the Middle Ages. The linguistic differences reflect the social gaps: French food on the table provides a French word emanating from the ruling class while the animals tended in the fields maintain their Anglo-Saxon linguistic origin. In the thirteenth century, while French was starting to loosen its grip in England, the opposite was happening elsewhere in Europe. In the Comt´e de Savoie (between France and Alpine Italy), one comes across a document written in French in 1253 (see Condeescu 1975, pp. 168–169), while in 1265 French became the official language of the realm of Naples, superseding the Toscan version of Italian, since the said realm was acquired by the counts of Anjou. Some Italian writers favored French as their mode of expression, witness Brunetto Latini who, between 1260 and 1266, drew up Li livres dou tr`esor (Treasure Books), during his exile in France. The wondrous, captivating adventures of Marco Polo, of Venice provenance, found expression in the French language (Le livre de Marco Polo), and attracted numerous translations in Europe during the Middle Ages. Certain watershed dates serve to highlight and explain the intense attach- ment the French nation feels and nurtures for its language, and it seems advantageous to recall them. The year 1539 provides a landmark in that it presided over the drawing up of the document (ordonnance) of Villers- Cotterˆets which was not the fruit of competition between Latin and all the regional languages but rather the result of the langue d’o¨ıl gaining ascen- dancy over all the remaining vernacular languages. Latin was no longer a choice in this case. Even before this date, in 1490, Charles VIII had decreed that all judicial inquiries and trial proceedings should take place either in French or in a regional language. Furthermore, 1512 witnesses the act of Louis XII who had pronounced a decree against the use of Latin, pointing out © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-19673-4 - A Reference Grammar of French R.