measures, which are deliberately limited (we are aware of the resistance to
the legal recognition of the notion of a Corsican people and the mandatory
character of the teaching of Corsican at school) and lack the political consensus
required for their extension. The sad truth is that traditional Corsican society,
based on a mountain agriculture, is in the process of disappearing; that the
new Corsican society is primarily urban; and that the urbanised young
generations speak French – the language of administration but also of
modernity – much more readily than they do Corsican. French solicitude for
Corsican is a form of suffocation. One of the reasons for the success of this
suffocation is that the number of Corsican speakers has not reached the critical
mass required to impose political changes: the comparison with Welsh, which,
although threatened, has resisted the language of empire much better, is
instructive in this regard.
It appears, then, that the history of a language, starting with its accession
to the status of independent language, is a political history: for Corsican did
not separate from Italian on account of the immanent weight of its phonetic,
morphological or syntactical system. Optimists will describe this situation in
terms of mutual presupposition; pessimists, in terms of a vicious circle: for
Corsican to emerge as a ‘natural language’ – i.e. as a national language –
Corsica must be a nation. But for Corsica to have the possibility of becoming
a nation, Corsican must be a natural language.
The relations between language and politics in the broad sense nevertheless
go beyond the contribution of the language to the constitution of the nation-
state, for they are much more profound. The language permeates civil society;
it forms part of the fabric of everyday life. We shall not be astonished to
see that this is how Gramsci describes the spontaneous philosophy not of
the scientist, but of the man or woman in the street. For him, everyone is
spontaneously a ‘philosopher ’ and this philosophy is contained in:
- language itself, which is a totality of determined notions and concepts
and not just of words grammatically devoid of content; 2. ‘common sense’
and ‘good sense’; 3. popular religion and, therefore, also in the entire system
of beliefs, superstitions, opinions, ways of seeing things and of acting, which
are collectively bundled together under the under of ‘folklore’.^23
Propositions (II) • 193(^23) Gramsci 1971, p. 323.