The French Language and Questions of Identity (review)

This well-produced hardback presents 19 chapters written by scholars from a variety of backgrounds around the theme of the title. Seventeen of the chapters are subdivided into four parts: Institutionalized Identity (five chapters); Regional Identities (three chapters); Social Identity (five chapters); Competing Identity (four chapters). To these are added an Introduction by the editors and an Envoi by Françoise Gadet. Institutionalized Identity focuses on issues concerned with standardization seen from different perspectives. Siouffi looks back to the diverse forces that drove the move towards the establishment of a standard in the seventeenth century, concluding that ‘le XVIIe siècle n’a pas été le siècle de diffusion massive du standard que l’on a pu s’imaginer’ (p. 21). Wionet and Bouveret bring out and exemplify the role and limitations which constrain dictionaries in the standardizing process. Joseph, making use of examples where frontiers have shifted, looks at whether language identity can belong to nations or whether it links more to Renan’s concept of a common mind and soul (‘âme’). Esch, using a quasi-experimental methodology, looks at the extent to which young people in Senegal identify with the languages they use and/or are learning, concluding that ‘French norms continue to be the target to which all students aspire’ (p. 61). Regional Identity offers an opportunity for Landrecies, Hornsby and Pooley to update the reader on the current position of Picard. ‘Le Picard’ Landrecies tells us ‘secrète sa propre mythologie’: how topical! Social identity deals first with subjective accounts by a group of French women on the use of Tu/Vous in their immediate circle (Gardner-Chloros) and then with the use of insults. Lagorgette relies mainly on literary sources to argue that insults form a specific subcategory of terms of address whilst Baines examines how recognition and perceived usage is influenced by gender, based on a fieldwork project in a number of schools in France and French Guyana. Beeching, using three corpora collected at different times in the recent past, shows how the usage of the desemanticized marker ‘quoi’ has changed. She makes the interesting claim that ‘questions of identity may constitute the missing link between synchronic and diachronic variation’ (p. 140). Pepin, using Swiss examples, argues strongly that identity is constructed through use in context: ‘la valeur emblématique de certaines formes n’est donc pas donnée une fois pour toutes mais (re)jouée dans et par l’interaction’ (p. 159). Competing identities looks at French where it is in contact with and maybe threatened by other languages: Italian in the sixteenth century French court (Cowling), German when French was the language of the Huguenots in seventeenth century Brandenbourg (Von Gemmingen), varieties of Arabic in the minds of young Maghrebians in twenty-first century France (Marley) and English (and other varieties of French) at various points in time in Louisiana (Valdman). What is here is very enjoyable and very readable. However, there are significant absentees. Why is there little or nothing on French in Quebec, in Belgium? On the role of Occitan? Was there nothing of interest in the large current survey the Phonologie du français contemporain?