Vergonha

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In Occitan, vergonha (Occitan pronunciation: [beɾˈɣuɲo̞, veʀˈɡuɲo̞], meaning "shame") refers to the effects of various language discriminatory policies of the government of France on its minorities whose native language was deemed a patois, where a Romance language spoken in the country other than Standard French, such as Occitan or the langues d'oïl, as well as other non-Romance languages such as Alsatian and Basque, were suppressed.[1] Vergonha is imagined as a process of "being made to reject and feel ashamed of one's (or one's parents') mother tongue through official exclusion, humiliation at school and rejection from the media", as organized and sanctioned by French political leaders from Henri Grégoire onward.[2][3][4]

Vergonha is still a controversial topic in modern French public discourse[5] where some, including successive French governments, have denied discrimination ever existed or downplayed its effects; it is a commonly cited example of sanctioned systematic linguicide and cultural genocide.[6] In 1860, before French schooling was made compulsory, native Occitan speakers represented more than 39%[7] of the whole French population, as opposed to 52% for francophones proper; their share of the population declined to 26–36% by the late 1920s,[8] Since the end of World War II, it experienced another sharp decline, to less than 7% by 1993.[9]

France has also continuously refused to ratify the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, and native non-French languages in France continue to be denied official recognition, with Occitans, Basques, Corsicans, Catalans, Flemings, Bretons, Alsatians, and Savoyards still having no explicit legal right to conduct public affairs in their regional languages within their home lands.[10]

  1. ^ Joubert, Aurélie (2010). "A Comparative Study of the Evolution of Prestige Formations and of Speakers' Attitudes in Occitan and Catalan" (PDF). www.research.manchester.ac.uk.
  2. ^ Grégoire, Henri (1790). "Report on the necessity and means to annihilate the patois and to universalise the use of the French language". Wikisource (in French). Paris: French National Convention. Retrieved 16 January 2020.
  3. ^ Cite error: The named reference France pp. 90-92 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference :1 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ Friend, Julius W. (2012). "The French Exception". Stateless Nations. Springer. pp. 137–154. doi:10.1057/9781137008206_7. ISBN 978-1-137-00820-6.
  6. ^ Llengua Nacional, Catalan linguistic review Archived 2011-07-16 at the Wayback Machine, spring of 2002. Text available at https://web.archive.org/web/20110711020813/http://fpl.forumactif.com/t2644-le-patois-des-vieux-el-patues-dels-vells#11914
  7. ^ Louis de Baecker, Grammaire comparée des langues de la France, 1860, p. 52: parlée dans le Midi de la France par quatorze millions d'habitants ("spoken in the South of France by fourteen million inhabitants"). [1] + [2]
  8. ^ Yann Gaussen, Du fédéralisme de Proudhon au Félibrige de Mistral, 1927, p. 4: [...] défendre une langue, qui est aujourd'hui la mère de la nôtre, parlée encore par plus de dix millions d'individus [...] ("protect a language, which is today the mother of ours, still spoken by more than ten million individuals"). [3]
  9. ^ Stephen Barbour & Cathie Carmichael, Language and nationalism in Europe, 2000, p. 62: Occitan is spoken in 31 départements, but even the EBLUL (1993: 15–16) is wary of statistics: 'There are no official data on the number of speakers. Of some 12 to 13 million inhabitants in the area, it is estimated that 48 per cent understand Occitan, 28 per cent can speak it, about 9 per cent of the population use it on a daily basis, 13 per cent can read and 6 per cent can write the language.'
  10. ^ Roger, Geoffrey (2019). "The langues de France and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages: Keeping Ratification at Bay Through Disinformation: 2014–2015". French Language Policies and the Revitalisation of Regional Languages in the 21st Century. pp. 309–333. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-95939-9_14. ISBN 978-3-319-95938-2. S2CID 158474654. Retrieved 29 July 2022.