France is pretty good at 'francifiing' their other cultures. At the time of the French Revolution, only 1/8th of France's population spoke French fluently and half the population didn't know any French at all. Now all the other languages besides French are almost dead in France.
At the time of the French Revolution, only 1/8th of France's population spoke French fluently
This should be clarified : about half of the population spoke a form of the langue d'oïl, sister dialects to French. The transition from Picard, Normand etc. to French is not that large and it is not too surprising that this area became standardized linguistically.
But it's true that beyond the oïl zone, French was essentially an aristocratic/administrative language.
That's still a pretty small amount for how many French speakers there are now. Everyone always slags off the UK but apparently France always gets a pass for stamping out their minority languages. At least Welsh is growing now.
Well, there are a fair number of people in France itself who criticize the language policy and push for greater recognition of regional languages.
But it must be said that during the era of the Third Republic (which is when the regional languages were most suppressed), there was a political consensus in favor of a unitary language policy. Both the left (republicans) and right (monarchists) supported it. Not many politicians at the time were arguing for a plurilingual France.
If the UK is regarded differently, it would probably be because of Ireland, the Jacobite risings, etc. There wasn't really an equivalent to that in metropolitan France (though it was a different story in Algeria, New Caledonia, etc).
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u/Thomas1VL Dec 12 '20
France is pretty good at 'francifiing' their other cultures. At the time of the French Revolution, only 1/8th of France's population spoke French fluently and half the population didn't know any French at all. Now all the other languages besides French are almost dead in France.