POLITICAL DISCOURSE ON LANGUAGE MANAGEMENT IN FRANCE (1997-2002)

Abstract

POLITICAL DISCOURSE REGARDING LANGUAGE MANAGEMENT IN FRANCE (1997-2002) French history is influenced, since the 16th century, by language standardisation. The French Republic has started its era through political Terror that was completed by language Terror. Since, France and French have been intertwined in terms of politics as well as in terms of collective representations. However, in recent years, during the mandate of L. Jospin as a Prime Minister (1997-2002), France debated about the possibility of acknowledging its language diversity. Although, for mere demographic reasons, this diversity is fading away, it meets a strong social support. In 1999, with the opportunity of signing the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages and in 2001 at the time where a possible new status was debated for Corsica, a language debate finally took place in France. From this debate, we built a corpus constructed to take into account all accessible discourse produced by French political personnel, seen as a discursive community. The consequence of such a project is a highly heterogeneous corpus, where Parliament debates, reports, law propositions etc. adjoin excerpts from written and audiovisual media. This heterogeneity commanded to approach the data differently: the vast corpus gathered from the Parliament (250,000 words approx.) underwent statistical treatment through Lexico3. This lexico-semantic analysis was hinged on manual analysis of the somewhat numerically smaller media corpus thanks to the lexical categorisation phenomena that were put into light via statistics. This lexico-semantic approach was completed by the analysis of the arguments deployed by different sides of the discursive community, as well as by an exploration of their collective representations of language management. Ideology about both the Nation and its future emerge from the debate, on a much wider scale than for languages (country's unity, human rights, diversity, etc.).