David Hornsby

Dedialectalization in France: convergence and divergence

Abstract This article challenges the received view that geolinguistic variation in France is both imminent and inevitable. It is certainly true that Frances ancestral dialects and regional languages are in terminal decline, and that a combination of late industrialization and the dominance of an oversized capital conurbation has engendered regional dialect leveling of a particularly extreme kind. But we will argue that new varieties are emerging, and that these represent independent vernacular norms rather than an ephemeral dialect residue as is generally assumed. While these regional French varieties are often embryonic, they are distinguishing themselves via a number of processes, including notably the creation of interdialect forms, differential adoption of urban variants and/or divergent norms for supralocal variables, the retention of archaisms, and local phonological divergence. Francophone Europe is seeing profound changes to the nature of geolinguistic variation, not the end of diversity.

Top-Down or Bottom-Up? Understanding Diffusion of Supralocal Norms in France

For over a century, France has held a central place in dialectological studies. The richness of its traditional dialectal variation — what Gaston Paris once called ‘une immense bigarrure’ (an immense patchwork) — attracted the interest of Romance philologists such as Jules Gillieron, whose Atlas Linguistique de la France (ALF), compiled with Edmond Edmont (Gillieron and Edmont, 1902–10), represents a major landmark for the discipline and continues to provide a mine of information for variationists. Recording in minute detail the findings of Edmont’s linguistic fieldwork in 639 villages in francophone Europe, the ALF inspired countless early twentieth-century dialect monographs and glossaries, while the latter half of the last century saw the publication of a series of works entitled Atlas Linguistique et Ethnographique de la France par Regions, designed to complement Gillieron’s work and using his original fieldwork questionnaire, which attest further to continued interest in France’s regional and local variation.

Nigel Armstrong & Tim Pooley, Social and Linguistic Change in European French, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, 288pp., £62.00, ISBN 9780230219502

would suggest that John Armitage’s chapter on ‘The face of the figureless: aesthetics, sacred humanism and the “accident of art”’ not only taps into the spirit of the collection but provides the reader with really helpful landmarks by which to navigate the techno-scientific landscape of Virilio’s thought. Armitage draws attention to a central opposition at the heart of Virilio’s aesthetics of disappearance, namely the dehumanising effects produced by what Virilio calls ‘profane’ humanism (the dromosphere, desensitisation, the dematerialisation and virtualisation of art) and an alternative humanism that Armitage terms ‘sacred’ and which he defines as ‘a system of thought that rests on human values, interests, needs, and especially the welfare of humans’ (161). ‘Sacred humanism’ is a form of resistance to the disintegration of ethical and aesthetic markers and the ensuing loss of meaning in contemporary art/media culture. This opposition, although Armitage stresses the point that ‘the sacred’ emanates from within the profane, resonates to different degrees across the chapters of this collection. Joy Garnett uses it to structure her critique of techno-culture and in particular its closure of distance. Garnett explores alternatives (‘correctives’) to the dominant power of the dromosphere through germinative, creative and spatial processes and activities (painting, cooking and other ‘poetics of ephemera’ such as the ‘accident in art’) that not only acknowledge the ‘dogma of acceleration as a polluant’ (39) but also contribute to the deceleration of time, accentuate the particularity of a bodily/human function (hand–eye coordination for example) and introduce a process of critical and reflective duration. In his chapter ‘The production of the present’ Ian James also calls for a recognition of ‘sacred humanism’ in his challenge to the viewer to ‘seize hold of the technicities of cultural production in order to produce different economies of effect, to produce singularities and intensities of experience’ (240). Telecommunicative technologies are rapidly changing how we see and perceive the present. For decades, Paul Virilio has been at the forefront of debates on the impact of this technology on real-time consciousness and space– time consciousness. This collection of essays brings into sharp focus the pervasive nature of this technology across many aspects of our daily lives. There is much in these essays to satisfy the high theorist and researcher, and also the museum curator, painter and student of visual culture. As Sylvère Lotringer claims, this work is a ‘breakthrough in Virilio Studies’. I agree and it is long overdue.

The myth of structured obsolescence

Using data from an obsolescent dialect situation in northern France, this paper questions the view that dedialectalization is a process of level-by-level attrition which leaves a linguistic residue in Regional French (the ‘Structured Obsolescence Hypothesis’). Comparison of dialect index scores for a number of variables reveals significant variation in rates of attrition within levels, with some phonological and morphological variants showing greater vitality than others, but no consistent relationship between levels as the model would predict. An alternative model is proposed, based on the relative learnability of different variants, and it is further argued that rejection of the Structured Obsolescence Hypothesis calls some other assumptions about Regional French into question, notably the view that it can be considered an intermediate variety between dialect and standard, and that it is necessarily ephemeral in nature.