Professor Stephen May: French policy endangers the languages of small nations or “nationality”, the languages of small peoples are excluded from the public life of the country and are doomed to extinction, says Stephen May, a professor at the University of Auckland.
In an interview with Lenta.ru, he explained that before the French Revolution of 1789 in the country had at least eight major linguistic communities. The revolutionaries who crushed the monarchical system, nevertheless, chose the northern version – the language of the royal court – as the “main French”, and therefore other languages in France began to be perceived as dialects.
Now there are fewer speakers of these languages - on they have hardly been spoken for the past two centuries. “These are languages endangered due to the” one language – one state “policy: the language that was chosen as uniting the country was imposed as a language for all citizens. The rest of the languages spoken began to be viewed as “backward”, “provincial” – and as a result, many of those who spoke them gradually abandoned their native dialects, “May explained.
Experts have repeatedly said that imposition politics “one language – one state” in France can be disastrous for its inhabitants.
Problems of national minorities and indigenous peoples in Western society have become one of the central themes of the project “Lenta.ru” entitled “Problems of the First World “. The materials are united by the theme of the crisis of liberal values in the Western world and the split in society. They talk about how the ideas of freedom and universal equality are turning into an instrument of oppression, and the struggle for the rights of some groups of people turns into the powerlessness of others.