Since I wrote on the French language, I have maintained myself a lot with linguists - Quebecois, French, Belgians, Africans -, who all express the same concern about the future of French.These are not the two usual scarecrows that are anglicisms and bad spelling.The real threat would rather reside in the growing gap between the written standard and the natural evolution of the spoken language.
This decoupling produces a powerful linguistic insecurity which results in all ways: self -Exclusion, silence, renunciation.Almost all the linguists I interviewed fear that we are approaching a breakdown.There is the risk of seeing millions of speakers abandon their language.But there is also the risk of seeing French burst into a multitude of distinct dialects, a perfectly natural trend, but that the absence of a realistic standard can only accelerate.
If I have never used this chronicle to to toilet phôtes, anglicisms or the language of my contemporaries, it is by personal conviction.Because you see, I understood quite young, around the age of 18, that the French that you read here or elsewhere in the news is not French.In fact, I have the intimate conviction that I have never really written in French.What constitutes French is the set of written registers and spoken in all dialect forms.The standard, in there, should be a point of balance between these uses, which means that it should evolve at each generation.
However, the written standard of French, which is falsely presented as French, is moving away more and more French as it speaks and gets along.A gap between the vernacular and the written standard is natural to all languages.This is similar to clothing standards: you don't dress in society exactly like when you go to bed.But in the case of French, linguists find that the gap is widening between a mummified written standard and oral uses that evolve at each generation.So much so that many do not hesitate to say that we are in the presence of two different languages: spoken French and written French.
Francophones are crushed under a kind of language catechism that leads them to think that language is the dictionary and grammar.This catechism is prescribed and defended, sometimes very violently, by the class of those who master the keys enough to claim that there is no French outside the dictionary and grammar - I barely caricature.The main obstacle to the evolution of the standard is that of the social distinction and the power that the guardians of the norm derive from their mastery.
But, you say, was there not the great reform of the new spelling in 1990?It was actually a reform whose main defect was its lack of ambition.The cleaning to do first concerns the superfluous double consonants, the vestiges of Latin letters (œ)) or Greek (th, pH)), unnecessary verbs times, inconsistent conjugations (you "say", but you "predise" orYou "curse")), and the exceptions around past participles, "all" and "such", for example.It is this ridiculous burden that monopolizes 75% of the teaching time devoted to the language, in pure loss.Even those who memorize him forget almost the entire examination.
I note, however, that a real reform has been going on for 10 or 15 years.Linguists and French teachers advance in these reflections in a posed way, and not at all radical.I am thinking of Claude Gruaz, of the EROFA group (studies for a rationalization of French spelling)), Georges Legros and Marie-Louise Moreau (spelling authors: who is afraid of the reform?)) And with translinguistic reflections around theInternational Conference Evolang.In the coming weeks, I will often come back to their work, and others also, which set the foundations for what a French standard was freed from its fetish shackles could be.
Petite histoire d’un corset
The current standard was statutled in the decade 1830.During the previous two centuries, the Parisian standard had evolved a lot. Par exemple, entre les quatre éditions du Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (DAF)) au XVIIIe siècle, 8000 des 18000 mots présents avaient changé d’orthographe ou de sens.Molière is an interesting witness to this evolution, especially since his theater wanted to be "spoken": the original edition of his Misanthrope (1666)) was written "betting" without "h", and "widow" rimed with "find".In 1835, the sixth edition of the DAF continued on this momentum by introducing a new wave of mass revisions.Its publication coincided with two major events: the creation of public education and the promulgation of an official spelling for the correction of civil servant selection exams.
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Flashing the jackpot, the publishers then reissued all the classics according to the new official spelling.And it is from this vast enterprise of linguistic revisionism, supported by the school and the official authorities, that the impression of the impression that the language of Molière was the bourgeois French of 1835.
Thus, we dared to reformat the language of Molière only 162 years after his death, but we have not dares for two centuries.Nothing moves because the norm has become an untouchable fetish - a fetish that increases when fewer people have the strength to wear it.
Last year, when I interviewed the linguist Annie Desnoyers about the project to simplify the rule of agreement of the past participle, she told me about her training on the new spelling.It usually starts with a small introduction to the Inuktitut syllabic writing system, then it asks the participants to take a few minutes to transcribe a French sentence using the Coractres of the Inu language.The sentence then takes on the appearance of the Inuktitut, except that if we read it aloud following the Inuit pronunciation, he takes out a perfectly intelligible French.You would do the same exercise with Arabic, Hebrew or Cyrillic characters and the result would be the same.(Besides, we are all familiar with the opposite case: the "Allahou Akbar" sentence is Arabic in Roman characters.Transcription follows the French phonetic system, but it is Arabic.))
This exercise featured that a language has nothing to do with its writing system, which is a scaffolding of conventions.When we adopt another writing system, all the orthographic or grammatical whims of French disappear, because they are no longer possible: only the necessary remains.
Which forces us to ask ourselves why it would not be oral French that would guide the written standard.
When we understand that, it becomes easier to see how our writing system is only an agreement that can be improved.That must be improved.At most "sacred".So that millions of students finally be able to focus on the essentials instead of paying rules quickly forgotten.And so that millions of adults find the pleasure of writing without wondering if they will be picked up by Denise Bombardier.
Some oppose this idea by saying "we must not level down", that "we would impoverish the language", that we cannot "let the dunce do the rule".But this is false: a standard more in line with natural French, a more transparent grammar would not appear French.No more than the rationalization of German or Spanish has impoverished the work of Goethe or Gabriel García Márquez.
Francophones, when they open their mouths, speak commonly in "phonetics" and understand each other very well.Why then should they write in a language that has almost nothing to do with what they say?
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