Le français face aux institutions

Sous la direction de Marie Landick. Paris, L'Harmattan, 2003. 139 pp. Pb €12.20. This interesting addition to L'Harmattan's growing and increasingly valuable sociolinguistics series, Espaces discursifs, is presented as proceedings of a one-day conference held at Royal Holloway in late 2000. By extending the notion of ‘institution’ to dictionaries and by its somewhat inchoate state, the first contribution by Henriette Walter ‘Les dictionnaires du français et de l'anglais et leur évolution’ detracts from an otherwise coherent volume. The most substantial contribution is Jean-Marie Pontier's ‘Le français et la loi’, which is a three-part overview of language policy in France from a lawyer's perspective. The first part deals with language laws from 1539 to 1994. The second deals with the central role of the French language in the various constitutions since the advent of the First Republic. The third part tackles the issue of the regional languages with special emphasis on events in the 1990s. Stephen and Anne Judge develop the issue of the incompatibility of the European Charter on regional and minority languages with the French Constitution in ‘Les langues minoritaires, la Charte et le facteur corse’. The choice of the term ‘minoritaires’ draws attention to the dilemma of a constitution that recognizes the human rights of all individual citizens but not of sub-national groupings, despite the relatively favourable treatment of Corsica. Emmanuelle Labeau's contribution ‘Le français en Belgique: l'union fait la force?’ provides an excellent exposé of linguistic factors in the Belgian constitution and their importance for national (dis-)unity. The chapter draws attention to the changing role of French, which for sound historical reasons Labeau divides into three periods: from 1830 when French was seen as a factor in national cohesion; from the late nineteenth century to the 1980s, when francophone Belgium conformed to French models in matters cultural and linguistic; developments of the last decade which appear to have their roots in the Gilson laws of the 1960s abandoning flexible linguistic boundaries in favour of fixed ones. Francophone Belgians, a minority in their own country and seeing themselves as different from the French, are seeking to develop their own identity. The remaining two chapters, which happen to be in English, complement Pontier's core chapter. Firstly, Malcolm Offord's ‘The Role of Private Associations’ does a competent job in categorizing the 238 non-government associations formed to promote or defend the French language. Marie Landick's ‘French courts and language legislation’ evaluates the practical effectiveness of the Toubon Law and the circulaire d'application (February 1997) on the basis of a dozen legal cases which occurred in 1997. While one may regret that certain aspects were not further developed, particularly other country profiles to complement Labeau's chapter on Belgium, this slender volume consisting of an introduction and six chapters is most welcome, since it provides useful clarification for both researchers and teachers on a number of important current social and linguistic issues in accessible form

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