Alsace in Innsbruck, from left: Eva Lavric, head of the France focus at the University of Innsbruck, Pierre Klein, president of the “Bilingual Alsace Association” with his wife, Elena Walpoth of the France focus.
05/26/2023
If Alsace is bilingual, is it French/Alsatian or French/German? Or maybe French versus German and Alsatian? And what of that still exists today? How can this linguistic identity be promoted or restored? A focus talk from France in mid-May addressed these and related issues.
Questions about bilingualism in Alsace and related issues were addressed in the lecture by Pierre Klein, president of the “Fédération Alsace bilingual”, to which the focus of France had invited on May 17, 2023 as part of his lecture “Alsace / Alsace” series . A large audience, well-informed about language policy issues, was taken in by the lecture, in which Pierre Klein unraveled the history of Alsace and therefore the roots of its bilingualism, as well as the history of the central French state and its political monolingualism that exists. centuries ago – as, incidentally, also from opposing trends, which repeatedly campaigned for the preservation and social role of minority languages and emphasized their cultural and identity-forming importance. A graph showing the development of everyday colloquial language in the population of Alsace over the last 100 years was particularly impressive: the curves for Standard German and the Alsatian dialect dropped sharply, from 100 to around 27%, and the curve for French went from about 5% to 100% today, with the same slope.
“Equating language and nation is a terrible misunderstanding that contributes to linguistic and cultural impoverishment and that has been strongly driven by state power, especially in the most recent phases of Alsace’s history, since the Second World War”, explained Pierre Klein, who identified himself as a true Frenchman, albeit from two different cultural and linguistic backgrounds. This corresponds exactly to Alsace’s dual identity as a region. He also described how courageous initiatives are building bilingual schools (French plus Standard German and Alsatian German) in Alsace in order to make its dual heritage accessible to younger generations.
Minority languages in general were then discussed based on the example of South Tyrol, which in a way serves as a model for other regions.
(Eva Lavric)