WI a more multilingual France?

Over in the blogosphere, Arnold Zwicky shared a map of the regional languages of France, with a link to an interesting site with recordings.

FrenchLgsMap.jpg


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?
 
Probably you need POD before 1789 before getting that. All French government were activily promoting Francophone and expand of French language.
 
Probably you need POD before 1789 before getting that. All French government were activily promoting Francophone and expand of French language.

Why would this be the case in France when nothing like so extreme a standardisation has happened in other large European countries such as Italy, Germany, Spain and the UK?

What we've got to understand is that the French/UK trend of eliminating local languages was not necessarily the norm across Europe. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire etc, the conquered peoples developed their own nationalisms, creating national movements and defending and promoting their own languages. Local languages which had been banished from the towns got the towns back, increasing language rights were won, and these countries all won their independence by the 1920s. As Simon Brooks describes in his book Why Wales Never Was, Western Europe and Eastern Europe went on totally opposite paths - in Eastern Europe the stateless nations did nationalism, preserved their languages and eventually became independent nation states, while in Western Europe, stateless nations like the Bretons did not develop their own nationalisms to any widespread or successful degree, and were assimilated by the conquerors. In Eastern Europe, larger multi-ethnic, multi-national empires split up into smaller more homogenous nation-states, while in Western Europe, the multi-lingual states like France and the UK assimilated their minorities and became homogeneous nation-states themselves.
 
Something would need to been done about the Revolution. Before then lots of villages were separated from any real roads by a day's worth of mug and mountain. Also less chance of the nobility or Church (if we consider how the sons of the nobility made up the majority of bishops, who needed to be more loyal to the King than the Pope at times) would support or allow independent schools to be funded or set up. Can't be having the peasants off the fields when they should be working to keep their betters in gold plated sturgeon and wine.
 

Archibald

Banned
The Third Republic heavily invested in schooling, except this was at the expense of regional languages. There was a deliberate destruction of such languages lasting over a century. You know, they were scorned with the deliberate term of "patois" which is extremely insulting and vexing. Interest for regional languages got out of the cultural ghetto in the 60's.
Entire generations (up to the generation of my parents) were traumatized: at home they were born and raised speaking Gascon, yet once at school their professors were full of propaganda - regional languages are archaic relics of the past. Speak French, or gets heavily punished.
 
Top