Volume 2020, Issue 261 - Special Issue: Corsican language: between past and future challenges, Guest Editor: Romain Colonna

This article presents the set of the central concepts of so-called “Corsican sociolinguistics” mainly elaborated by Marcellesi. It also shows the history of their collective elaboration within Marcellesi’s research center and on the Corsican ground. It aims at showing that they constitute a whole coherent sociolinguistic theory which is useful for many sociolinguistic situations and not only for Corsican.

This article proposes to return to the “birth” of Corsican sociolinguistics and the main notions that fuelled the emergence of Corsican as “language”. The reflection goes back to the development of the 1970s and 1980s in order to better understand the context of the time and the reasons that allowed such a birth. It will also highlight the contribution of the main figures of this period and the constant relationship with Corsican sociolinguists. Two important figures emerge from this dialogue, notably Heinz Kloss and Jean-Baptiste Marcellesi whose theories have been taken up and crossed to characterize the evolution of the Corsican situation. Thus, discussed here are, in particular, the concepts of elaboration, distancing and polynomie.

This article deals mainly with the notion of polynomie, which has occupied a large place in Corsican studies and in Corsican sociolinguistics. It is argued in this article that this concept developed by the sociolinguist Jean-Baptiste Marcellesi and the process it covers have allowed the emergence of Corsican as a “language”. The aim here is to propose a synthesis that takes the form of an advocacy for a bi-plurilingual societal model potentially better adapted to the Corsican political aspirations. The implications and applications in language didactics or literary production will be discussed in particular.

In this article, we question one of the important notions of the Corsican normative conceptual apparatus: the polynomie. This concept is particularly interesting as a language ideological position that calls into question dominant ideological perspectives on standardization and normalization. This article puts the polynomie in an ideological process that calls for a critical sociolinguistic analysis that first accounts for the interaction between sociolinguistic, economic, political and ideological domains. That critical sociolinguistic perspective emphasizes that all language ideological frameworks – even those which recognize diversity – impose particular criteria and give value to some ways of speaking and being over others.

This article attempts to establish the important links between Corsican sociolinguistics and Catalan sociolinguistics. To this end, it returns to the main characteristics of Catalan sociolinguistics through the notion of “diglossia” and “language conflict” it generates, notions that have largely fed minority studies. Moreover, the terms of the famous Catalan dilemma are clearly stated by the substitution of the dominated language or its normalization as inevitable outcomes of linguistic conflict. The reflection tries to establish the parallels between the various situations and the passage from the Catalan elaboration of a conceptual tooling in a situation of domination to the Corsican sociolinguistic and political fields. Finally, we propose to re-evaluate the initial Catalan conceptual framework in order to better adapt it to the Corsican situation, notably by showing some limits of this framework in terms of diglossic polarities and representations.

Within sociolinguistics, work on the commodification of language has gathered pace in recent decades. Monica Heller, in “Globalisation, the new economy, and the commodification of language and identity”, published in 2003 in the Journal of Sociolinguistics , contends that in the new globalized economy, language is commodified as a measurable skill, an inalienable characteristic of group members, and a marker of authenticity. Whilst the ability to speak Corsican is a potential aspect of the commodification of the language on the island, this article will explore in particular the extent to which the Corsican language is a characteristic of Corsican-ness, as well as a marker of value and authenticity in the economic market on the island (see Monica Heller and Alexandre Duchêne, “Pride and profit: changing discourses of language, capital, and nation-state”, published in 2012 in Language in late capitalism: pride and profit ). Based on a corpus of product labelling from Corsican soft and alcoholic drinks, I investigate the extent to which Corsican, as a named language, and other visual resources are used for meaning-making in the presentation of local products. In doing so, I consider here the unevenness in the use of Corsican in the labelling of drinks which reflects the contours of regional language revitalisation and the shifting cultural value attributed to both French and Corsican depending on the product that retailers are seeking to sell.

The Mediterranean island of Corsica became French in 1768–1769, and Corsican is one of the most widely used regional languages in France. In Corsica, the language issue is politically prominent, with a very strong opposition between the nationalist regional government, which claims a co-official status for the Corsican language, and the French national government, which advocates the supremacy of the national language. However, the French linguistic integration process has been an astonishing success since the end of the nineteenth century, and the first mass mobilisations in favour of the Corsican language did not take place until the 1970s. In this article, I try to explain why the politicisation of Corsican language came so late; how this language became a politically salient issue; and how public attitudes and policies towards this language have substantially evolved. Since 1982, the state and the state-wide parties on the island have amended their strategy and challenged the near-monopoly of Corsican nationalists with regard to the defence of the Corsican language. Especially in the field of education, they promoted and implemented a language policy shift, and tried to depoliticise this issue. Nonetheless, political positions remain polarised regarding measures such as compulsory education and co-official status.

The policy of normalisation of the Corsican language carried out by Corsica’s institutions encounters the statute of languages in France, which supports the linguistic supremacy and monopoly of French in the public area. The vitality of Corsican underlined in the first general sociolinguistic survey makes it endangered even if a large majority of people support bilingualism and the project of co-officiality is approved by the Corsican Assembly. What are the main ways and results of public policy to save, revitalize and normalize the Corsican language in the context of the success of the assimilation of French minorities, a crisis of national identity in France, and cultural globalisation for a small population of 320,000 people who live on an island in the Mediterranean Sea?

The Corsican language is in a paradoxical situation characterized, on the one hand, by a decline in its use which is directly related to strong political action by the French Republic in favour of a complete centralization of the language in the country – which began in the middle of the nineteenth century as regards Corsica in particular – and, on the other hand, by a strong political desire, expressed by a large majority of the population and carried out by the Corsican Assembly, to initiate a real program of linguistic revitalization in order to grant the language of the island an official status. This situation enlightens the linguistic tension hidden behind the official monolingualism that the French Constitution enacts. It constitutes a real challenge for the State, on both political and legal grounds. This article expounds, from a political and legal point of view, especially in municipal, international and European law, the different obstacles such a desire for a revitalization will encounter, as well as the potential legal disputes that could emerge from it, on the base of the European Convention on Human Rights or European Union law.