The minoritie in Europe: french example

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But those languages are mostly (surtout) used by former (anciens) inhabitants of the neighbor (voisin) countries. Then there are a lot of small dialects that are specific of small part of France. Most of the time, they are not used anymore except between the old people. The consequence is that they may disappear (disparait) in the next few years. Even if they were quite used as a second language after French fifty years ago, nowadays there is no way (moyen) for young people to learn them. So with this example we see the problem of education and transmission of the languages.

Finally there are some languages that have a very complex status. They are the languages used by the people that arrived recently with immigration. Those languages have no specific status, they are used by a quite important population sometimes but this population is spread (répartie) all over the country.

Part 3 : The linguistic minority policy implemented in France

Now, I would like to study the state management of the language minorities in France. The main difficulty is that the second article of the French constitution says that ‘The language of the republic is French’. That means that it would be necessary to change the constitution to admit the regional languages.

The main example of this difficulty would be the example of Corsica, which is for the French one of the 26 regions and has also the status of a territorial collectivity. That means that the collectivity as more power than the other regions but those powers are really limited but it has its own assembly. There are various movements in Corsica which ask more autonomy from France, or even full independence. They want to improve the status of the Corsican language, they want more power for local governments, and not to be forced to pay for national taxes.

Corcica is a good example of the difficulty to have a link between the administration division or classification of a region and the reality in the daily life. The situation is never as simple as a strong community which defends a minority language against (contre) the national majority.

The main thing to understand is that France is the example of a state which has and wants to keep (garder) a single official language. This leads (cela conduit) to the ambition to promote the French all over the world for example with some institutions as the ‘Francophonie’. As a consequence, this country refuses to ratify the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. This refusal is the evidence of the specific French conception of regional and minority languages.

Conclusion:

To conclude, I would say that even if the debate will remain (reste) in France about the status of minority languages, there is little chance to see great changes because of the political tradition and the threat (menace) of separatism. France is nowadays characterized as a country full of endangered (disparition) languages. The main example would be Breton. In the 1950s, more than one million people spoke Breton as their main language whereas today, only 250,000 people are still able to speak it and most of them are old. The only light in the tunnel for language minorities in France would be the process initiated in 2004, which is called decentralization of the state powers. This new program intends to devolve powers regarding language policy to the French 26 regions.

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