SECTION:
Standard Variations and Conceptions of Language in Various Language Cultures
Christian Delcourt (Univ. de Liege, B)
French and Belgian FrenchIt is hard to tell how many people speak French in Belgium in that by political agreement national censuses no longer ask questions about the citizens' mother tongue! In any case a rough estimate of the ratio French speakers in France to French speakers in Belgium is 10 to 1.
Since France is the birthplace of French, since it is the country of approximatively half of the people who speak French in the world and since - from the cultural, the economic and the political viewpoints - it comes first, Belgian French (or Canadian French or Swiss French or Congolese French, etc.) is not a match for (French) French.
On the other hand French is yielding ground to English and as a result is more and more attentive towards the idiosyncrasies of its "marches" or frontiers. However it is hardly more than lip service or - as far as the so-called culture and language industries are concerned - selling strategy.
In French-speaking Belgium language policy is entrusted to institutions that sometimes diverge from their French counterparts. For instance the Académie royale de Langue et de Littérature françaises is more open than the Académie française to the orthographical reform and to the "feminization" : "LA juge" rather than "LE juge" when the magistrate in question is a woman, etc. Belgian-French words are no longer described as "mistakes" but as specificities. There is also some nostalgic attachment to Belgian French at a time when dialects are dying. Etc.
On the other hand a number of circumstances which range from the rail (TGV) to the currency (euro) make Belgium closer to France than ever. For instance the common adherence of France and Belgium to the European Union entails a linguistic standardization of the products. As a result Belgian fishmongers are no longer allowed to use the traditional word "elbot" (cf. English "halibut") when they sell what zoologists call "Hippoglossus hippoglossus": they are bound by law to use the French word "flétan"! Linguistic specificities die hard but in the long run Belgian French will amount to private jokes, to a few words that are "better", i.e. handier than their French counterparts (e.g. "septante" vs "soixante-dix": "seventy") and ") and to "statalisms" (e.g. "échevin" vs "adjoint au maire": "deputy mayor").
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