What good is a supercentral language?

Abstract

The article focuses on shifts in justificatory repertoires within France for the promotion of the French language beyond the regions of the world where it is securely the core language. It is based on a corpus of twenty French public policy reports on external language and cultural policies published between 1998 and 2018. The corpus is characterised by a thick referential interplay, and its authors work within a loose and evolving advocacy coalition. The reports suggest that France’s position as a “supercentral” world language is characterised by significant fragility, and that its defenders must break with former representations of French as a prestigious language of culture and diplomacy. They argue that it must “equip” itself as a manifestly useful, broadly attractive and polycentric language in a new geolinguistic space. At an initial level, they attempt to justify its external projection by framing French with its specific attributes and reach as a sui generis global public good. They supplement this stock of justifications by invoking a privileged role for French in the defence of the second-order global public good of linguistic diversity as such. These discursive moves produce both ruptures and continuities in relation to the French cultural and language policy traditions of rayonnement and universalism.