Actas da - Xunta de Galicia

Minority languages of Metropolitan France: a long road
whole cursus is in the minority tongue, with a progressive introduction of french
and foreign languages: this kind of schools mainly for primary cursus numbers
some 6000 pupils. Here, too, the proportion is very low.
As for the medias, the landscape is much the same. There is breton, occitan,
basque... on TV and radio, but most often with a small amount of time granted,
and only, of course, on regional public channels (in spite of the recent birth of a
private breton TV, (TV Breizh) which is anyway mainly french-speaking). Here
too, it cannot be said that the regional languages topic is popular among medias
national deciders...
3. Problems and resistances
The fact is that french state does not look too favourably upon minority
languages, and therefore does not take real measures for their sake. It has been
evident with the tragi-comical episode of the European Chart for less used
languages, which french government grudgingly, as ever, accepted to sign, but
failed to have ratified, for constitutional reasons: the second article of french
constitution states that french -and only french is officially used on Republic's
territory. That does not allow any progress in the official recognition of other
languages. More recently, an attempt of Education Ministry to include in
national educational system the Diwan breton schools have failed, for the same
reasons -apparently.
For one can guess the problem is not purely a juridical and constitutional one.
Neither is it a true political one. In spite of the importance of corsican problem,
there is no serious danger of separatism in the minority languages-speaking
regions. Nor is there any danger for the sake of french: as we said above, the
whole french population is now french speaking, and the process cannot be
inversed -and nobody, in fact, wishes to inverse it. So what? Apparently, the
enemies of any amelioration of "regional languages" status claim to believe in
the impossibility of true bilinguism, and consider that inevitably one of the two
languages in contact must swallow the other. But this rather primary binarism is
perhaps not the bottom motive of opposition. A carefull reading of the displayed
argumentary shows two more deep dimensions. First, the old fear of a
disparition of France in an Europe of which France can no longer pretend to be
the center. This "souverainisme" as they call it, leads to an exageration of the
cult of old national symbols, the french language in particular. Any place for
other languages is therefore thought of as a danger. This point of view exists,
and is well spread in some sectors of national opinion.
But much deeper, the true problem seems to be a very old contempt for
languages considered as lacking of litterary illustration (for very few in France
are aware of the occitan litterary tradition since the Troubadours, for instance).
Some may even summarily point "regional languages" as purely oral, and
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