Итог полностью

8 Only by transposing the representation of the national language is one led to think that regional dialects exist themselves divided into sub-dialects - an idea flatly contradicted by the study of dialectics (see F Brunei, Histoire de /a langue fran^aise des origines a nos jours (Paris: Colin, 1968), pp* 77-8)* And it is no accident that nationalism almost always succumbs to this illusion since, once it triumphs, it inevitably reproduces the process of unification whose effects it denounced,

9 This is seen in the difficulties raised by the translation of decrees during the Revolutionary period in France. Because the practical language was devoid of political vocabulary and divided into dialects, it was necessary to forge an intermediate language. (The advocates of the langurs d'oc do the same thing nowadays, fixing and standardizing orthography and thereby producing a language not readily accessible Io ordinary speakers.)

10 G. Davy, Elements de sociologie (Paris: Vrin, 1950), p. 233.

11 Humboldt's linguistic theory, which was generated from the celebration of the linguistic 'authenticity* of the Basque people and the exaltation of the language-nation couplet, has an intelligible relationship with the conception of the unifying mission of the university which Humboldt deployed in the creation of the University of Berlin.

12 Grammar is endowed with real legal effectiveness via the educational system, which places its power of certification at its disposal. If grammar and spelling are sometimes the object of ministerial decrees (such as that of 1900 on the agreement of the past participle conjugated with avoir), this is because, through examinations and the qualifications which they make it possible to obtain, they govern access to jobs and social positions.

13 Thus, in France, the numbers of schools and of pupils enrolled and, correctively, the volume and spatial dispersion of the teaching profession increased steadily after 1816 - well before the official introduction of compulsory schooling.

14 This would probably explain the apparently paradoxical relationship between the linguistic remoteness of the different regions in the nineteenth century and their contribution to the ranks of the civil service in the twentieth century. The regions which, according to the survey carried out by Victor Duruy in 1864, had the highest proportion of adults who could not speak French, and of 7- to 13-year-olds unable to read or speak it. were providing a particularly high proportion of civil servants in the first half of the twentieth century, a phenomenon which is itself known to be linked to a high rate of secondary schooling.

15 This means that linguistic customs' cannot be changed by decree as the advocates of an interventionist policy of ‘defence of the language* often seem to imagine.

16 The 'disintegrated' language which surveys record when dealing with speakers from the dominated classes is thus a product of the survey relationship.

17 Conversely, when a previously dominated language achieves the status of an official language, it undergoes a revaluation which profoundly changes its users' relationship with it. So-called linguistic conflicts are therefore not so unrealistic and irrational (which does not mean that they are directly inspired by self-interest) as is supposed by those who only consider the (narrowly defined) economic slakes The reversal of the symbolic relations of power and of the hierarchy of the values placed on the competing languages has entirely real economic and political effects, such as the appropriation of positions and economic advantages reserved for holders of the legitimate competence, or the symbolic profits associated with possession of a prestigious, or at least unstigmatized, social identity,

18 Only the optional can give rise to effects of distinction. As Pierre Encreve has shown, in the case of obligatory liaisons — those which are always observed by all speakers, including the lower classes - there is no room for manoeuvre. When the structural constraints of the language are suspended, as with optional liaisons, the leeway reappears, with the associated effects of distinction.

19 There is clearly no reason to lake sides in the debate between the nativists (overt or not), for whom the acquisition of the capacity to speak presupposes the existence of an innate disposition, and the empiricists, who emphasize (he learning process. So long as not everything is inscribed in nature and the acquisition process is something more than a simple maturation, there exist linguistic differences capable of functioning as signs of social distinction.