This is my first post on the forum. I am the first generation born in the US from a French speaking family from Quebec. I am trying to understand my French heritage and this seems to be a wonderful place to learn. I believe to learn a culture one has to understand their history. Not the history of kings and queens but the history of the people. So I pose this more as a question then a statement. My understanding of Modern French is that in reality it is a relatively new language. Before the French revolution if one left Paris and traveled into the interior of France a person would have a great deal of difficulty understanding the langauge. In fact one village would find it difficult to understand the next village. The French revolution took great efforts to standardize the language and eradicate these dialects. Eventually not speaking proper French was taken as a sign of ignorance and through time generalized to all non french languages. This is just a speculative thought.The thing I find most perplexing about the French is the reluctance to accept new words into the language, or to borrow words from other languages.
The standardisation of languages is a very recent process. It is not until universal compulsory education was introduced in the late 19th or early 20th century that one standard language became spoken by the whole population of large European countries like France, Germany, Italy or Spain. It is only since WWI (when soldiers from all parts of the country met on a daily basis), then with the media revolution (radio from the 1920's, then TV in the 1950's) that people who traditionally spoke dialect started preferring the standard form though.
France was actually somewhat of a pioneer in standardising language in the late 18th century, although modern French is just a slight evolution of the traditional Parisian French dialect of the 17th and 18th centuries. What changed most is the way of speaking rather than the spelling or grammar. It is probably easier for modern French speakers to understand 17th century Parisian French (e.g. Molière) than it is for English speakers to understand 17th-century Southeast English (Shakespeare).
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