throughout the world, only 130 are national languages – that is, if we accept
the most current definition, the official language of a political entity. For the
linguistic question is irrevocably a political question. The class struggle is so
closely mixed up with idiomatic struggle that the fact of being, or not being,
a national language crucially affects all languages, including (and perhaps
especially) those that are going to die. Hence my second example, selected
for reasons that are more biographical than scholarly, and directly inspired
by my quotation from Barère’s speech. It revolves around an issue whose
directly, and explosively, political character will be obvious to every French
person: is Corsican an independent language? This slanted question, which
anticipates a positive response, is recent. It was not posed in Abbé Grégoire’s
time, or until the middle of the twentieth century, when Corsican was a dialect
of Italian, certainly closer to the Tuscan that gave rise to standard Italian than
many other dialects (e.g. Venetian or Bergamask), but scarcely more than a
patois spoken by illiterate peasants. And linguists are indeed obliged to
acknowledge that Corsican and Italian are mutually intelligible, that they
have parallel morphologies and similar syntaxes, and that they share a good
deal of their vocabularies – in particular, the stable part that names natural
kinds and everyday objects. The differences, which obviously do exist, concern
pronunciation (Corsican has palatalised phonemes that do not occur in standard
Italian: but this might be regarded as a mere difference of accent, since French
is not spoken in the same way in Lille and Marseilles) and vocabulary, which
are increasingly diverging.
But the fact that the question has been posed in the last forty years and
has received a positive response cannot be ignored – any more than the fact
that it is bound up with the emergence (or re-emergence) of a Corsican
nationalism. A language is now not a dialect equipped with an army (Corsicans
do not have one), but a dialect promoted to the status of a language because
an imaginary community has decided to find its unity in it or to base its unity
on it. (This aspect of a political decision is important in the case of Corsican,
which is divided into several dialects, whose grammars carefully distinguish
between the speech of the south and the north of the island: one sometimes
has the impression, when opening a Corsican grammar, of learning two
languages for the price of one.) The irony of this situation is that the accession
of Corsican to the status of independent language owes much to French – a
language that threatens to liquidate Corsican; to the language itself and the
French educational apparatus. To the French language in the first instance.
Propositions (II) • 191