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- Title
Introduction.
- Authors
Blanchet, Philippe; Schiffman, Harold
- Abstract
This section introduces a series of articles on the sociology of language. The study of the sociolinguistics of both the autochthonous Romance languages of southern France and the southern dialects of French, alongside the unavoidable issue of Standard French itself, has long been dominated by the so-called Occitanist point of view. This point of view, which developed in the 1970s, tended to present the various autochthonous regional and local languages and dialects of southern Gallo-Romance as a single language known as Occitan. The unspoken hope for this language was that it could be somehow unified in order to reverse a situation of diglossia perceived as purely a conflict with French, and to replace French in all its official and social functions, within a single large region called Occitania. Local varieties of this supposed Occitan were treated as if they were moribund remainders of an ancient society, and were to be transformed into one standard language with a single spelling. Southern dialects of French, born from a mixing of local languages and French, were thus considered as another threat to the use of Occitan and their role as a go-between or perhaps intermediaries in the sociolinguistic situations in question was rarely recognized.
- Subjects
FRANCE; SOCIOLINGUISTICS; LANGUAGE &; culture; LANGUAGE &; languages; LINGUISTICS; ROMANCE languages; OCCITANS
- Publication
International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2004, Vol 2004, Issue 169, p1
- ISSN
0165-2516
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1515/ijsl.2004.040