Against the backdrop of regional languages in France undermined by centuries of policies and left in a marginalized state, this book edited by Michelle A. Harrison and Aurélie Joubert presents the evolution of French language policies and their impact on regional languages and their communities, trying to draw increased attention to the repressed linguistic and social identities of the minority speakers, with a view towards their ethnocultural equity and diversity. The book is organized into 15 chapters gathering studies tackling different aspects of French language endangerment, revitalization and language planning in various territorial minority languages including Breton, Alsatian, Occitan, Basque, etc.

The first chapter addresses the socio-political and ideological background that bred the superiority of standard French. It points out that the linguistic ‘intra-national uniformity’ and the intolerance of linguistic diversity in French society are not regulated by policy, but driven by people’s prevailing ideology of linguistic nationalism and centralization constructed by deep-rooted republican values (4). This chapter indicates how research should delve deep into ideological factors when examining the French language policies and their impact on regional language evolution.

Chapters 2 to 4 analyse various obstacles in establishing linguistic classification for regional languages; the obstacles can all be attributed to the political ideology of centralization in France and the resultant exclusive linguistic imposition of the national French language through the exercise of political power. For example, McCrea (the author of Chapter 2) illustrated French administrations’ successive marginalization of ‘langue d’oïl’ (Ager Reference Ager1999: 17), the various dialects spoken in Northern France, and disclosed that it was the French language ideology of providing exclusive status to standard French that prevented the langues d’oïl from being classified as purely linguistic and non-social (57). Chapter 5 to Chapter 7 examine the transmission and changes of language and identity brought by the new generation of speakers to traditional communities. Joubert (the author of Chapter 5), for instance, conducted semi-structured interviews with 65 Catalan and Occitan speakers, and the collected corpus data revealed that in the twenty-first century with more plurilingual/pluricultural practices fluxing into the center of acts of identity, the evaluation of linguistic identity is now perceived less with the natural and dominant language-identity link but more with personal choice, willingness, interest and positive feeling about the local language and culture (124). These micro-felt values of regional languages and cultures were further demonstrated to be compatible and complementary with the macro-structured national identity. This fact propelled the government to reconceptualize the traditional exclusive and homogenizing identity in endangered language planning (Pennycook, Reference Pennycook and Ricento2006: 71). Chapters 8 to 10 highlight new developments in the context of new technologies and the heightened visibility of regional languages, offering inspirations for regional language policies in the internet age. As a case in point, Eploy, Martin and Mathieu (the authors of Chapter 9) did corpus-based surveys of the visibility of Picard, a langue d’oïl, on the Internet, through sites, blogs and a data exchange list and found that Picard could be mostly tracked in local cultural contexts, such as in translated literary texts, theatrical staging, music or animations, as well as using proverbs (211). The results showed that the digital tools greatly promoted the cultural relevance of Picard, which inspired language planning to progress towards democratic reforms in cultures. Chapters 11 to 15 present an overview of the contemporary situation of minority language revitalization in France from the educational domain to the European Charter, meanwhile illustrating both the promotion and suppression delivered by the language policies. For example, Roger (the author of Chapter 14) conducted a corpus-based discourse analysis of the arguments made by policy makers in France, who advocated against the ratification of The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (European Council 1992). The author summarized their disinformation/misinformed argument strategies based on the premise that multiplicity of French regional languages ‘causes an excessive cost’, ‘attacks France’s National Sovereignty’, etc and subsequently put forth rational refutations (309--328). Roger criticized the idea that, though these arguments violated public opinion and were ‘rife with ignorance’ (327), they still stand strong in France and make France increasingly isolated in Europe and beyond.

In general, the book is logically structured with comprehensively covered studies, presenting a systematic surviving situation of regional languages and the material cultures these languages live with, as well as multi-layered reflections on languages in France. The most noteworthy part is its powerful arguments in justifying the legitimacy of regional languages’ revitalization and in criticizing the monolingualism, as supported by both the ideology analysis and the corpus-based methodology. Bell (Reference Bell2001) claimed that language choices are not objective mirrors of linguistic reality, but important symbols of the society’s ideologies that are usually directed by political power. The book does not stop short at attacking the hegemonic linguistic management or the uniformized linguistic policies, but pays more efforts to examining the prevailing social philosophies and political values that generate these behaviors, dissecting the French linguistic situations in depth. The studies of the book mostly conducted corpus-based analyses of the minority speakers’ expressions, which are capable of maximally projecting the up-to-date linguistic situations and the language ideologies in the reality (Mautner Reference Mautner2007). Yet, these corpus data were identified and analysed subjectively, so the studies cannot be called corpus-based in the real sense (Chernyavskaya Reference Chernyavskaya2017). It is suggested that applying quantitive analysis methods with the aid of corpus tool processing would give objective data support to strengthen the power of the arguments. Nonetheless, we strongly recommend this book to students and scholars of the sociology of language, sociolinguistics, language policy, minority languages and language endangerment.