Regional Language Policies in France during World War II by Aviv Amit

Abstract

Reviews 255 ne se donnent pas à…). Achard’s analysis may be of interest to French researchers and teachers who wish to take a fresh look at the complex class of French impersonal constructions. University of Delaware Ali Alalou Amit, Aviv. Regional Language Policies in France during World War II. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. ISBN 978-0-230-35517-0. Pp. ix + 186. $95. Amit describes four regional language situations in France—Breton, Corsican, Occitan, and Alsatian—finding similarities while acknowledging differences. Breton and Occitan exist only in France, each riven by dialectal differences that have complicated maintenance and revival efforts. Corsican and Alsatian are closely related to the dominant language of neighboring countries, a different but equally complicating factor for maintenance and revival. After two introductory chapters Amit devotes a chapter each to these examples, and then three chapters to the analysis of similarities. The central focus is on the period from 1920 to 1945, but preceding and subsequent histories are provided as well. Amit opposes “top-down” policies of the French government against “bottom-up” maintenance and revival movements. The period and the place constitute a Bakhtinian “chronotope” that brought about the virtual extinction of these languages. One difficulty of studying regional language policy is that much of the primary and secondary material literature is written by militant supporters of regional language movements, compromising the objectivity of the facts; for example, estimates of the number of speakers of a language vary wildly. Amit recognizes these dangers but sometimes cannot refrain from moralizing in the same vein, such as “France must [...]” recommendations (158). Because maintenance and revival movements are driven by intellectuals, the church and the nobility, Amit’s insistence on the“top-down—bottom-up”opposition seems misplaced. More often a local/regional top combats a national top, with the real bottom—the everyday people who speak the language—left out. Creating a regional standard and making it a language of education and public life involves imposition of external norms, just as in the case of a national standard. The volume offers much good information about each region’s language, but the lack of objectivity compromises the details. The pre1920 history is suspect; for example,Villers-Cotterêts did not“impose the language of the King on the French people,” nor was it “the first language policy in France” (16). The leaders of the French Revolution were initially open to regional languages, only abandoning a policy of translation after counter-revolutionary threats (royalist uprisings in Bretagne, sympathies for Austria in Alsace) and after fraud in translations destined for Occitanie. Some things omitted might have provided nuance: Dominique Huck and Paul Lévy’s work on Alsace, Brigitte Schlieben-Lange’s on translation in the Revolutionary period, the vast literature on Villers-Cotterêts, the influence of the League of Nations’Minority Treaties on the revival of regional identity movements in the 1920s, the annual reports of the DGLFLF. Amit shoehorns his case studies into several models—Ferguson’s of diglossia, Haugen’s of standardization, Hroch’s of nation-building, and Bakhtin’s chronotopes—none particularly convincing. That the connection of regionalism and linguistic revival to fascism’s discredited racial theories drove the“final nail in the coffin”(161) of regional languages is reasonable. Ultimately the long, slow death may have had as much to do with the aspirations of the“bottom” as with the impositions of the national and regional “tops.” University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Douglas A. Kibbee Forakis, Kyriakos. Structures complexes du français moderne. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2014. ISBN 978-2-343-04671-6. Pp. 187. 19 a. This slim but thorough volume provides a detailed account of sentences with embedded clauses in French. The subject matter being quite specific, this volume is highly specialized. The analysis is not strictly syntactic but focuses more on the nature of the dependency relation, such as that of causality (as in the case of puisque), temporality (e.g., quand), and concession (e.g., bien que), among many others. Syntactic tree representations are used to highlight differences of interpretation or to justify the categorization of a particular structure. The discussion also touches on grammatical implications, reviewing the verbal tense or...