Abstract
ABSTRACTIt is often claimed that France is a particularly purist country; the Académie française is seen to be representative of a purist outlook and popular works such as Étiemble's attack on English influence Parlez vous franglais? (Étiemble, 1964) have served to bolster this view. However, this claim has not been empirically verified. In order to determine whether or not the rhetoric around purism in France matches the reality, we developed a questionnaire to investigate whether or not ordinary speakers of French in France are purist, taking the theoretical framework in George Thomas's Linguistic Purism as a base (Thomas, 1991). This questionnaire was distributed online to a random sample of participants in France. To contextualise the findings, the questionnaire was also distributed to French speakers in Quebec. The results of the study show that, contrary to expectations, the French respondents display only mild purism and the Québécois respondents are more purist in the face of English borrowings (external purism). However, the French respondents are more concerned with the structure or ‘quality’ of the French language itself (internal purism) than their Québécois counterparts. This study also highlights some problems with Thomas's framework, which requires some modification for future research.
Highlights
It is often claimed that France is a purist country; the Academie francaise is seen to be representative of a purist outlook and popular works such as Etiemble’s attack on English influence Parlez vous franglais? (Etiemble, 1964) have served to bolster this view
Olivia Walsh language ideology that exists in France at the official level affect their linguistic consciousness? We may expect them to hold more purist attitudes towards their language than speakers in a country less associated with a strongly purist rhetoric, but is this the case? This article aims to determine whether or not the rhetoric around purism in France matches the reality, at the level of individual speakers of French
If France really is the typical purist country, we would expect French speakers in France to be more purist than those in Quebec, the additional hypothesis: French speakers in France are more purist than French speakers in Quebec
Summary
University of Cambridge (Received November 2012; revised June 2013; first published online 30 July 2013). Thomas’s framework was used to design a questionnaire to measure purist attitudes and behaviour in France The questionnaire measures both external purism, aimed at foreign elements, and internal purism, aimed at the structure or ‘quality’ of the French language itself. Elitist purism, which is negative towards any non-standard speech, were examined by measuring reactions to usages which are contrary to prescribed norms Thomas bases his framework on a broad definition of linguistic purism, described as: the manifestation of a desire on the part of the speech community (or some section of it) to preserve a language from, or rid it of, putative foreign elements held to be undesirable (including those originating in dialects, sociolects and styles of the same language). If the threat is wholly or partially external, which of the following describe the threat more clearly?
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