Over in the blogosphere, Arnold Zwicky shared a map of the regional languages of France, with a link to an interesting site with recordings.
In our timeline, France ended up becoming almost entirely Francophone, most of these regional languages ending up getting quite marginalized. Partly this was an unexpected byproduct of government policy mandating the use of French; it's not necessarily clear that the centralizers in charge would not have been happy with general bilingualism, not monlingualism.
Is there a single POD, say post-1789, that could change this? What would it take to have France be more linguistically diverse, perhaps on the model of Italy?
In our timeline, France ended up becoming almost entirely Francophone, most of these regional languages ending up getting quite marginalized. Partly this was an unexpected byproduct of government policy mandating the use of French; it's not necessarily clear that the centralizers in charge would not have been happy with general bilingualism, not monlingualism.
Is there a single POD, say post-1789, that could change this? What would it take to have France be more linguistically diverse, perhaps on the model of Italy?