If ever there were a shared misapprehension on both sides of the Channel, it is the way royalty in the past were supposed to have set the standard by which the local accents were judged. The King’s English, for example, fell into disrepute when a succession of Hanoverians ascended to the throne. At first they did not speak English at all, and even when their successors did, it was in a dreadful guttural and almost unintelligible tone. The Queen of France’s French was not much better. Marie de Médici, for example, was said to have poor eyesight and even poorer French, with a pronounced Italian accent.
Nowadays London English and Parisian French would probably claim to be the standard by which accents are judged, although many people vociferously object to the idea of there being any norm at all. Jacques Mirail, a professor of linguistics at the University of Toulouse, suggests that ‘television French’ as supplied by the national state channels is as close as you can get to French with a ‘neutral’ accent. The view of the general population is largely determined by where they live. Parisians would say that people of the Midi, the south of France, have a twanging nasal accent. They in their turn would claim that the rapid, taut tones heard in Paris are just as much an accent, simply a different kind.
Originally the 40 members of the Académie Francaise, established in 1635 under Cardinal Richelieu, were supposed to rule on the desirability of accents as well as on vocabulary and grammar, but so violent were their disputes that issues relating to accents were quickly abandoned and left to evolve of their own accord. The modern body responsible for the French language, the Haute Comité de la Langue Française, established in 1966, deals primarily with written French. It devotes most of its energies to an unceasing but often unsuccessful war on Franglais, best defined perhaps as the synthetic outcome of attempts to graft an English word or phrase on to the French language. Common examples include le show business, le management and l’email.
Conversational French, irrespective of the accent of the speaker, is seen by some linguistic professors to be close to anarchy. The French-born children of North African immigrants have a language all their own, known as beurs. Many young people speak a slang called verlan, often incomprehensible to adults, in which words take on an entirely different meaning. In verlan for example, an Arab is known as a bear, a femme (woman) as a meuf, and the phrase laisser tomber (meaning ‘forget it’) becomes laisser béton.
Since 1981 thorough research into linguistics has been carried out by the ERSS or l’Equipe de Recherche en Syntaxe et Sémantique, the Team for Research into Syntax and Semantics. Based in Toulouse, they have made a particular study of the distinctive languages and sounds of southern France, where many people still speak Occitan, Basque and Catalan in preference to French.
The ERSS director, Jacques Durand, believes languages and accents follow a sociological pattern. As an example he points to Castilian as the dominant, upwardly mobile accent in Spain, setting the standard for everyone else. The French have their prejudices about accents, too. ‘At present it would be inconceivable,’ said Durand, wading into dangerous waters, ‘for someone with a Midi accent to be elected President of France’.
Durand preaches tolerance for different languages and different accents, but only so long as the person speaking can be readily understood. He cites his experience at Disneyland Paris when he arrived with his family and checked into one of the hotels. His little girl, brought up in the south of France, was listening to the receptionist with a look of complete bewilderment, completely unable to fathom her posh Parisian accent. ‘Maman,’ said the little girl, ‘she doesn’t speak like us, she can’t be French’.
