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The two souls of «francophonie»
I'm a frenchified consort. Therefore, in my house the language of Michel de Montaigne is daily used. To me, French does not need added values because its usefulness is inherent to its usage. Until her death, our beloved dog was also a bilingual animal Catalan-French. We never had a sociolinguistic misunderstood with her. We talked to her and she understood us without complaining apparently about our family bilingualism. I suppose that along her fourteen years of life she also understood Castilian, because in Valencia, as it seems logic to think, Cervantes' language is learned like any other environmental virus: by contamination.
I provide you my biographical anecdotes without sociological analysis value, of course. But by doing so you will understand my sentimental split faced with some inappropriate comments made by the highest representatives of French-speaking. As you know, the French Language Academy refused the reform of the first article of the Constitution of our neighbouring country. The Constitution was approved by the Assembly the 22nd of May and it says that «regional languages, such as Catalan and Basque belong to the French heritage». The mother of all the academies wants the text to be withdrawn because the eminences think that «placing regional languages before French in the Constitution is a challenge to logic and a negation to the Republic, a confusion about the nation principle and a political object».
The members of the Academy, an institution founded by Richelieu 150 years before the French revolution, have no doubt about regional languages belonging to the common heritage and consider them a sign of the «French nation wealth». But they believe, with their superior judgement, that the recognition is an attempt against «French identity».
To me, that I've already experienced the same speech between the defenders of Hispanic world and its provinces, it makes me laugh so much identity essentialism, contested by the complexity of air du temps from my point of view. The French paradox -such us the one of the Spanish speakers in relation to Puerto Rico, for example- is that theses eminences are the same ones who scream blue murder at English advance in the French speaking society in Canada and, in general, at a globalisation model built in the «free flow of communication» way and sustained upon the power of majors and networks of the United States of America.
As a frenchified consort and, therefore, twice more loyal to the French Republic, I've been always identified with the praiseworthy defence -started with the Jack Lang initiative in 1981- of all kind of cultural exceptional cases with origin in the French hexagon: since the riots against junk-food headed by José Bové and the consequent defence of terror food to the countless state help to production, distribution, promotion and consumption of the audiovisual and cultural industries in the Molière's language. Being sure of the «protected culture» status of Hollywood language which is based, obviously, in the defence of cultural and linguistic diversity that we demand to ourselves just in the same way French people do. But, in those days of sociolinguistic lucidity, this paradox reveals to me a discursive duplicity that raises my deep split between the Hyde that survives hidden inside my Jekyll.
The weeping against the empire language of mister Marshall and the multilateral coalition constituted by Catalan, Breton and Basque seems to be a paranoid evil axis born in the heart of old Europe -so cultured, democratic and respectful- as a counterpoint of the grandeur and a francophonie revered as imperial relics further than the real change value of French language. It's a delirium attributed to an institution like the French Language Academy guided by the slogan A l'immortalité in a secular tradition country, where it flourished like anywhere else la joie de vivre. If our dog could look up…
Toni Mollá
Journalist and author of Manual de sociolingüística.
