La langue racontée: s'approprier l'histoire du français par Anne-Marie Beaudoin-Bégin (review)

The third and final book in a trilogy of provocative texts on variation and change in French, this volume seeks to retell the story of French's historical evolution by recalibrating the narrative to recognize the contributions of commoners and Francophones on the American continent. The introduction acquaints the reader with different types of linguistic variation (age, region, socioeconomic class, communicative context and modality), driving home the idea from page one that language cannot exist without a consideration of those who speak it. Exposition begins where it often does in discussions on the history of French, but with one important difference—an emphasis on the vulgar Latins (plural) that came to occupy present-day France via the Roman Empire, a change motivated by the earlier observation that language varieties are as numerous as the communities using them. Insisting on the plurality of language at every turn, discussion advances through a survey of expected milestones on the path to present day—rustica romana (ninth century), The Oaths of Strasbourg (842), the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts (1549), the foundation of the Académie française (1635). What makes this book unique is where its narrative goes next. In traditional accounts, discussion often remains in France and focuses on the Enlightenment, the Revolution, the piecemeal establishment of a pedagogical grammar via scientific principles, the patois-French bilingualism of rural speakers, the unifying effect of French among regional soldiers during World War I and the heyday of twentieth-/early twenty-first-century mass communication. This text eventually travels there, too, but not without first making a judicious bifurcation in the narrative to include the linguistic history of the territories of New France (the French North American Empire) from the sixteenth century. Parallel American-European intrigues carry us through to recent events, with an attention to their occurrence in both Francophone spaces: SMS-induced language change, the great 2016 spelling reform (née en 1990), mass media-induced crosspollination, and the need for speech recognition systems to be trained on actual French varieties instead of idealized ones. What makes this text remarkable is that it embodies the most profound messages it has to offer its readers—those of style shifting, variation awareness and social representation. Comprehensive yet accessible, the narrative espouses a rigorous and playful tone that refocuses the hegemonic oversights of traditional France-centric accounts and delights the reader with Easter eggs aplenty. This book is a gamechanger for all those who teach the history and/or sociolinguistics of World Frenches or are interested in issues of linguistic diaspora. The text astutely closes with Maurice Druon's (Académie secretary from 1985–1999) proclamation, "Tout s'aveulit," in reference to changes in the French language being indicative of a more generalized weakened state among contemporary Frenchmen ignorant of its rules. Beaudoin-Bégin corrects this by pointing out what she has affirmed all along—that the history of World Frenches is a dynamic narrative, not a weakening one, co-constructed by its speakers, who, thanks to mass communication, are just beginning to take possession of it from all corners and strata of the diaspora.