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Current status of Occitan?
I'm glad you are no longer are among us.
Let's talk about Occitan: do you think there are any chances for surviving this language/s? How come old French was much closer to Occitan than it is nowadays? Read the oaths of Strasbourg and you'll get what I mean...
Ok, the Oaths of Strassbourg in which the monks tailored the Vulgar Latin script so as to facilitate the pronunciation of Louis and Charles. I found that fascinating; it's as if you can see the language coming to life before your very eyes.
Yes, an important development in marking the Oil dipthongs, basically officialising a shift away from purer phonetics that was already occurring at the spoken level. Can Occitan survive? Yes, but to what degree, I'm not sure. In my country Gaeilic (not helped by a ludicrous orthographic system) will survive as a relic, an academic pursuit, a token official language and perhaps Despite having quite a distinct history, and Occitan having numerous advantages, I can't imagine either language enjoying a rebirth of authentic usage. I guess modern Hebrew is pretty unique in that respect in the case of Israel. Do you know any other examples? I know there was Swahili in Kenya and Tanzania post-colonial rule but I'm not sure that this was anything other than a lingua franca between the different nations there, and besides, English is also seen as a lingua franca there too.
" What I am vindicating is the simple acknowledgement that we these languages are in the position they are today through acts of coercion. "
And?? in what way does it surprise you? Everything in that world is the result of often violent histories. your indignation seems very selective. If Europe is christian, if north africa is muslim, if united-states speaks English, if Mexico speaks spanish it is because there have been a violence. You should be probably one of those guys who would say to latin-Americans that they should stop to speak spanish or Portuguese, stop being catholic because the latinization of latin-America was very violent! Guess what? Most latin americans are proud of speaking spanish or Portuguese and being catholic and consider it to be the heart of their culture: and it doesn't mean that they don't know their history, of that they don't consider that hispanization was rude; it is just that it is what they are now: spanish-speaking peoples or portuguese-speaking people. History is history and it made all of us what we are generally not with nice sentiments. " And that previous generations of people, families, schoolchildren were brutalised (and I mean that literally) and suffered - not in a symbolic sense but in a very real sense: an act of violation on their privacy." these families you speak about are our own families (me and I think le Toulousain to). I knew my great grand-mother who spoke some Provençal. She felt to be french and never complained about having to speak french. She used to complain about many things (germans during the war, American cultural domination, high prices, social problems, imigration) but never about the rudeness about speaking french. I don't say it was never the case much farther in the past (18th/19th), but as I said above it is history, and if we like it or not history is what is was and canno't be changed. " I am not for one moment suggesting that a sudden overnight conversion of France to federalism and nouveau regionalism will somehow undo the past or even be worth all the hassle and expense. But I am saying that the ideology which emanated from Paris was in itself a nationalism, a violent nationalism at that. " well, yes history is full of violent nationalism, that have been that way most of the time. Should I stop to speak french or try to return my ancestor's language (a culture that is not mine anymore) because some of my ancestor entrered into french-speaking culture in a violent way? well, why learning occitan, we could directly work for the rebirth of Gaulish language (or at least recognise as our official language Gaulish), since the romanization of Gaul was pretty much more violent that the frenchification of "Occitania"... PS: french people we don't complain about centralism. some countries are centralized, nother no, you need everything to make a world as we say in french... " Maybe despite they no longer speak their vernacular languages and speak only French, Southern French people still have big resentment deep in their soul inherited from generations ... " Completly wrong. Southern french are just french people that live in the south, and absolutly don't feel any resentment (excpted maybe against the numerous British, Germans or Dutch that settle en masse in the most beautiful areas of southern France, attracted by the sun, making the prices going at so high levels that the native southern french of these areas have difficulties to afford a house, and are in the necessity of using English to commercial many things) You know concepts such as northern/southern french are relative and moving; today most people have family roots or family living in various parts of France; and many people live their life in various parts of our beautiful and various country. Me for exemple, I am a northerner, or a southerner? I have family roots in both Paris, central France and in Provence; I lived in both Paris and PACA region big parts of my life; I Have ancesters that spoke french, Breton, Provençal (I don't like the term "occitan", which let thinking that vernacular languages of Provence is like Limousin's). In what side am I, where is the border between those two Frances that are supposed to divide me?? That way of seing France just doesn't correlates to the reality. That is what Parisian wanted to say when he spoke about a urban legend. It is the tipical antimoonian urban legend, and many people seem to still believe to it.
English,Scots,Northern Irish and Welsh feel British too.
British? Well they are British, there's no question of that... but they certainly don't feel English. And the English don't feel 'British', we feel English.
<<Because France is a democracy! In a democracy it is the majority that rules.
In Provence, Languedoc, Limousin, Gascogne, Auvergne, etc. 99% of people are native french speakers french and the huge majority of them feel themselves completly french, they just don't want to be obliged to speak/learn/use a language that it not their native language, and that is spoken/known by a minority (often polically very oriented) inside these regions (this minority usually have french as their first native language either by the way). >> It is result of assimilation policy in France. <<[edit] Policies of assimilation A policy of assimilation is one that uses strong measures to accelerate the downsizing of one or more linguistic minority group(s).The ultimate goal of such policies is to foster national unity inside a state (based on the idea that a single language in the country will favor that end). The measures taken by States enforcing such policies may include banning the social use of a given language, the exclusion and social devaluation of a language group and in extreme cases repression by force and even genocide. [3] These policies are to be distinguished from all other policies which it could be argued favor or lead to assimilation of members of minority groups as a result of non-intervention or insufficient measures of protection. In practice, all States enforce, implicitly, policies leading to assimilation with regards to immigrant groups and in numerous cases aboriginal groups and other national minorities.[3] Jurisdictions having such a policy: Burma - Indonesia - Iran - Iraq - Russia - Thailand - Vietnam - France - Slovakia >> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_policy
<<.....— Ireland is an island, they had under British occupation their own Parliament and a (Catholic) Church of their own, and have been independent for decades.
— Wales didn't have any Parliament nor any Church of Wales, for centuries it had been ruled from London as a part of England....>> This is a very good point. However, I must mitigate. Ireland's parliament didn't exist before English (technically Anglo-Welsh-Norman) intervention on the island after 1160 and the subsequent establishment of continental court culture. Ireland wasn't even a coherent polity, unified or disparate, by any comparison with contemporary European standards. It was a much different civilisation; not even feudalism had reached Ireland (unlike England which in this sense was at least politically and administratively coherent, if not fully united), nevermind Norman-French civility! Ireland was an island of tribes whose chief currency was cattle; farms as such didn't even exist outside of the monasteries. The Parliament was abolished in 1801 and all Irish representatives moved to London to take office there. The abolition was a punishment for rebellion despite the fact that the Irish Parliament had never officially declared itself for or against the rebellion. Westminster could nevertheless accuse the parliamentarians of incompetence and negligence in preventing the rebellion. Even during its existence, Catholic representation in the parliament was forbidden (although some Catholics did make a token public conversion to Anglicanism) until the 1830s. You say that Ireland had its own Church under British rule. Well, not quite. Yes and No. The official Church of Ireland since the mid-1500s and until 1871 was the Anglican church, largely (though not exclusively) drawn from people of English stock and culture and from which the ruling elite in the parliament was drawn; and yet it never represented more than 20% of the population! So to what degree Irish Catholics being the majority population enjoyed any political representation, symbolic or real, is dubious. Furthermore, you are right to say that Wales did not possess its own established Church (being part of the Church of England), but this had a negligible impact on the reality of Welsh language used in religious practice. Bibles were written and distributed in Welsh for private consumption and the fact that most of central and northern Wales (heavily wooden and mountainous terrain) was isolated from commercial and social contact with English did help prevent the English language making substantial inroads in the Welsh speaking heartland. Irish Catholics, apart from being discouraged to read the bible at all, would at best only be able to do so in Latin according to the Vatican, for a large period of time. So Gaelic was unable to count on this vital educational tool. THirdly and most significantly; the greatest loss to Gaelic speaking population of Ireland was the mass starvation and emmigration resulting from the famine of the 1840s, which reduced the overall population by a quarter and proportionally devastated more those Gaelic speaking heartlands (the West, North-West and South). Otherwise, levels of Celtic language survival in Ireland would be much more similar to that of Wales today. Regards, joolsey
France must accept Occitan as independent language,as Poland accept German and Lithuanian as separate languages in cPoland.
" It is result of assimilation policy in France. "
Of course it is! And??? In what does it bother you? History is history, and our countries in Europe have not been built in the same social and identitarian model. You seem so sure that "your" model is the unique and the best that anyone that would have another would have a bad one! Please try to be more objective and try to understand that you don't own the monoply of goodness and politicly correctness, those things are subjective and follow cultural patterns... We don't care if assimilationism bother you so much, we just don't live in societies that seem to have the same conception of who we are. France is an assimilationist and metisage-based country, that is the way we are, that is deeply part of our identity. Are we obliged to follow the German federalist model, the Biritsh one, or the American very raced-based so-called "multiculturalism"?? Are these systems where someone that has his ancestors coming from a "minority" (whatever this minority is "indigenous" or imigrant could never be fully part of the nation, but in which he is obliged to identitificate to a "minority group", and will (and his decendants) will be considered forever (until they will be the majority) as being primaraly part of this group instead of being fully part of mainstream culture? I don't say that countries that have those systems should change it for a more assimationist systeme as the french republican system is; I accept that all societies in the world don't have the same view, and don't want to construct the same kind of societies, even if I think that non-assimilationist systems will lead at one time or another to balkanized societies and will be confronted to inter ethnic rivalities (or even "ethnic" islocation, I'm almost sure it will happen to the US withing a few years or decades, and probably also in Britain). Said that I won't say that we own the best system, or the only "moral" one as you seem to do, I won't post topic on internet clamining that what USA or Britain do are bad things; those countries do what they want; as long as it is democratic and wished by its people (no majority of people in any regions in France considered itself "dominated or "destroyed" by the french state, the assimation of regions in the french identity have been made not dureing some sort of dictatorship as it was in Spain (and that why it failed), but it was made democraticaly with the consentements of the majority!! that is democracy! Said that, you have the right of not being a democrat, at least recognise that you are not one (since you prefer that a independist / autonomist / regionalist minority dictates to the majority what it has to do!) why would I have the pretentiousness to tell them what they have to do in their own countries?? think a bit about that... when your countries would collapse under their own intraseque divisions you would have more time to meditate that.
La vergonha (Occitan for "shame", pronounced [beɾˈɣuɲɔ]) is what some Occitans call the effects of various policies of the Government of France on its citizens whose mother tongue was a so-called patois, specifically langue d'oc. Vergonha is being made to reject and feel ashamed of one's (or one's parents') non-French language through official exclusion, humiliation at school and rejection from the media as organized and sanctioned by French political leaders, from Henri Grégoire to Nicolas Sarkozy. Vergonha, which is still a taboo topic in France where some (especially Parisians) still refuse to admit such discrimination ever existed, can be seen as the result of an attempted linguicide[1][2].
16th to 18th century Beginning in 1539 with Art. 111 of the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts [3], non-French languages in France were reduced in stature when it became compulsory "to deliver and execute all [legal] acts in the French language" (de prononcer et expedier tous actes en langaige françoys). Originally meant as a way to eliminate Latin in official documents — few 16th-century French subjects were educated and familiar with Latin — it also stated that French and only French was legal in the kingdom (en langage maternel françoys et non aultrement). [edit] Late 18th to late 19th century [edit] Abbé Grégoire's "Report on the necessity and means to annihilate the patois" The deliberate process of eradicating non-French vernaculars in modern France and disparaging them as mere local and often strictly oral dialects was formalized with Abbé Grégoire's Report on the necessity and means to annihilate the patois and to universalise the use of the French language [4], which he presented on June 4, 1794 to the National Convention; thereafter, all languages other than French were officially banned in the administration and schools for the sake of linguistically uniting post-Bastille Day France. At the time, only one tenth of the population were fluent in French.[5] In reference to "patois", Jean Jaurès famously claimed that "one names patois the language of a defeated nation"[6]. According to the Chambers Dictionary, the origin of the term is disputed but could be a "corruption of patrois, from LL patriensis, a local inhabitant". Four months earlier (January 27), Bertrand Barère de Vieuzac, although an Occitan from Tarbes himself, claimed [7] before this same Convention that The monarchy had reasons to resemble the Tower of Babel; in democracy, leaving the citizens to ignore the national language [that of Paris], unable to control the power, is betraying the motherland... For a free people, the tongue must be one and the same for everyone. [...] How much money have we not spent already for the translation of the laws of the first two national assemblies in the various dialects of France! As if it were our duty to maintain those barbaric jargons and those coarse lingos that can only serve fanatics and counter-revolutionaries now! [edit] The end of traditional Occitan provinces: divide and rule This policy can be noted by the way France's internal borders were redrawn, creating 83 départements. The law was passed on December 22, 1789 and took effect the following year, on March 4, 1790. In the 20th century, the départements were grouped into régions, to create a level of government between the departmental and national. While the régions were intended to replace the old provinces, they were not necessarily formed along the same boundaries. As the map shows, there were eleven Occitan-speaking enclaves in the pre-1789 state, such as the powerful lands of Languedoc and Gascony, but they were divided into seven régions with no regard whatsoever for cultural and linguistic identities. This is how Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur was created out of portions of five Occitan provinces and three capitals were scrapped in favour of Marseille; and Auvergne came to comprise both native and Oïl-language entities. Meanwhile, the city of Nantes was administratively removed from Brittany, of which it had been one of two traditional capitals (along with Rennes), and the city of Toulouse was not included in the région of Languedoc-Rousillon, though it had historically been located in that province. Many of the régions contain hyphenated names, reflecting the merging of multiple historically distinct areas. This is true for four of the seven régions of Occitania: Languedoc-Roussillon, Midi-Pyrénées, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur and Rhône-Alpes. As a result, the centuries-old singularities of the various Occitan-speaking parts were overlooked and shaken in a deliberate effort by the newly-formed government to weaken and parcel out long-established feudal domains so that republican France would subdue traditional allegiances, as Antonin Perbòsc reveals in the Foreword to his Anthologie:[8] When the Constituante (National Constituent Assembly) created the départements, their goal was clearly to erase the old geographical and historical distinction of the provinces; however this goal was not as perfectly met as some would have liked: in general, the départements were made up of pieces of existing provinces, quite seldom of the reunion of parts from different provinces. If one could criticize this territorial division for being too arbitrary and too geometric, what can be said of Tarn-et-Garonne, born of a sénatus-consule (a law by the Senate of France) on November 2, 1808? Of course, one may think that the Centralisateur (Napoleon Bonaparte) felt real pleasure showing he could do even better than the centralisateurs of the National Constituent Assembly. With fragments of Quercy, Rouergue, Agenais, Lomagne, Gascony and Languedoc, creating a new unit so little vast and yet so diverse of soil, language and race, what a great idea! And maybe the audacious half-god had only one regret: coming a little too late to redesign according to this pattern all the provinces of old France... Late 19th century - Policies and legacy of Jules Ferry [edit] School humiliations In the 1880s, Jules Ferry implemented a series of strict measures to further weaken regional languages in France, as shown in Bernard Poignant's 1998 report to Lionel Jospin [9]. These included children being given punishments by their teachers for speaking Occitan in a Toulouse school or Breton in Brittany. Art. 30 of Loi d'éducation française (French Teaching Law, 1851) stated that: "It is strictly forbidden to speak patois during classes or breaks." As Pêr-Jakez Helias (1914-1995), the author of the 1975 best-selling novel Le Cheval d'orgueil (The Horse of Pride), recalls in this interview [10], Now I know, I learned that there was a government policy which goal was obviously to make France one and indivisible, and as a result regional languages had to disappear. But I didn't know it then and maybe the teachers of the Third Republic did, though I asked some of them and they all denied it. Their own job was to teach us French. And consequently, while attending school, we were required to speak French. Whenever we used Breton instead, we weren't doing our share and so we deserved to be expelled. Period. Among other well-known humiliations was clogging young rebels, namely hanging a clog (sabot) around their necks as this young lady recalls her grandparents telling her:[11] My grandparents speak Breton too, though not with me. As children, they used to have their fingers smacked if they happened to say a word in Breton. Back then, the French of the Republic, one and indivisible, was to be heard in all schools and those who dared challenge this policy were humiliated with having to wear a clog around their necks or kneel down on a ruler under a sign that read: "It is forbidden to spit on the ground and speak Breton".[12] That's the reason why some older folks won't transmit the language to their children: it brings trouble upon yourself... This practice was referred to as le symbole by officials and "la vache" (the cow) by pupils, with offenders becoming "vachards". Many objects were used, not just clogs: horseshoes, shingles, slates, wooden plates with a message, coins with a cross on them. The following are official instructions from a Finistère sub-prefect to teachers in 1845: "And remember, Gents: you were given your position in order to kill the Breton language."[13] The prefect of Basses-Pyrénées in the French Basque Country wrote in 1846: "Our schools in the Basque Country are particularly meant to substitute the Basque language with French..."[14] Resorting to the practice of clogging is confirmed by the Autonomes de Solidarité Laïques website [15]: School has had a unifying role inasmuch as speaking the "noble" language [French] reduced the use of regional dialects and patois. Let us mention the humiliation of children made to wear a clog around their necks for inadvertently speaking a word in the language of the people. As for signs, they were also found in Poitou schools [16]: It seems as though Jules Ferry making school free and compulsory in 1881 materialized the work started four centuries earlier [with the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts]; the method of repression and humiliation that was undertaken bore fruit with, for instance, the famous signs in school reading: "It is forbidden to spit on the ground and speak patois." The Conselh de Representacion Generala de la Joventut d'Òc (CRGJOC, General Representation Council of the Occitan Youth), through the Youth of European Nationalities website [17], reports that Our language [Occitan] lost its name, becoming some "patois", first at school and then in families through putting pressure on women in education ("Interdit de cracher par terre et de parler patois") with the French Third Republic, Mussolini and Franco. The Confolentés Occitan (Occitan-speaking Limousin) website [18] testifies of the methods used by French authorities over the past century or so: To help efface traditional regional identities, the Occitan language was not merely discouraged but actively suppressed. School pupils were punished well within living memory for speaking their native language on school premises. The French administration managed to make the Occitan speakers think of their own language as a patois, i.e. as a corrupted form of French used only by the ignorant and uneducated. This alienating process is known as la vergonha ("the shame"). Many older speakers of Occitan still believe that their native language is no more than a shameful patois. This is one reason why you rarely hear it in public — or anywhere outside of the neighbourhood or family circle. In the school of Camélas in Northern Catalonia, a former pupil reports,[19] Everyone but the teacher's children spoke Catalan among themselves. We'd even get punished for that, because at the time, we all had to speak French. Be Clean, Speak French could be found written on the school's walls. And if you refused to speak French, they'd give you some sort of wooden sign to wear until death came, as we said, which meant the last offender, in the evening, had twenty lines to copy. We'd speak French in the schoolyard, and for the first ten metres of the way back home, for as long as we thought the teacher would overhear us, and then we'd switch back to our own mother tongue, Catalan. In those times, Catalan speakers were rather despised. My generation associated speaking Catalan with a disadvantage, with being less than the others, with running the risk of being left behind on the social ladder, in short with bringing trouble. Abbé Grégoire's own terms were kept to designate the languages of France: while Breton referred to the dialect spoken in Brittany, the word patois encompassed all Romance dialects such as Occitan and Franco-Provençal. In his report, Corsican and Alsatian were dismissed as "highly degenerate" (très-dégénérés) forms of Italian and German, respectively. As a result, some people still call their non-French language patois, encouraged by the fact they were never taught how to write it and made to think only French exists in the written form. [edit] Pressure on the church In 1902, in a speech before the Conseil Général of Morbihan, Chief Education Officer Dantzer recommended that "the Church give first communion only to French-speaking children"[20]. In the same year, prime minister Émile Combes, himself an Occitan, told the prefects of Morbihan, Côtes-du-Nord and Finistère[20] that: Breton priests want to keep their flock in ignorance by refusing to promote education and using only the Breton language in religious teachings and catechism. The Bretons will only be part of the Republic the day they start speaking French. [edit] Mid-20th century to the present As the Catalan linguist Jaume Corbera Pou argues[1], When at the mid-19th century, primary school is made compulsory all across the State, it is also made clear that only French will be taught, and the teachers will severely punish any pupil speaking in patois. The aim of the French educational system will consequently not be to dignify the pupils' natural humanity, developing their culture and teaching them to write their language, but rather to humiliate them and morally degrade them for the simple fact of being what tradition and their nature made them. The self-proclaimed country of the "Human rights" will then ignore one of man's most fundamental rights, the right to be himself and speak the language of his nation. And with that attitude France, the "grande France" that calls itself the champion of liberty, will pass the 20th century, indifferent to the timid protest movements of the various linguistic communities it submitted and the literary prestige they may have given birth to. [...] France, that under Franco's reign was seen here [in Catalonia] as the safe haven of freedom, has the miserable honour of being the State of Europe — and probably the world — that succeeded best in the diabolical task of destroying its own ethnic and linguistic patrimony and moreover, of destroying human family bonds: many parents and children, or grandparents and grandchildren, have different languages, and the latter feel ashamed of the first because they speak a despicable patois, and no element of the grandparents' culture has been transmitted to the younger generation, as if they were born out of a completely new world. This is the French State that has just entered the 21st century, a country where stone monuments and natural landscapes are preserved and respected, but where many centuries of popular creation expressed in different tongues are on the brink of extinction. The "gloire" and the "grandeur" built on a genocide. No liberty, no equality, no fraternity: just cultural extermination, this is the real motto of the French Republic. [edit] Constitutional issues In 1972, Georges Pompidou, the President of France and an Occitan, declared that "there is no room for regional languages in a France whose fate is to mark Europe with its seal"[21]. In a pre-election speech[22] in Lorient, on March 14, 1981, François Mitterrand asserted that: The time has come to give the languages and cultures of France an official status. The time has come to open school doors wide for them, to create regional radio and TV stations to let them be broadcast, to ensure they play all the role they deserve in public life. These declarations however were not followed by any effective measures. In 1992, after some questioned the unconstitutional segregation of minority languages in France, Art. II of the 1958 French Constitution was revised so that "the language of the Republic shall be French" (la langue de la République est le français). This was achieved only months before the Council of Europe passed the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages [23], which Jacques Chirac ignored [24] despite Lionel Jospin's plea for the Constitutional Council to amend Art. II and include all vernacular languages spoken on French soil. Yet again, non-French languages in France were denied official recognition and deemed too dangerous for the unity of the country[25], and Occitans, Basques, Corsicans, Catalans, Bretons, Alsatians, Savoyards and Flemings have still no explicit legal right to conduct public affairs in their regional languages within their home lands. The text was again refused[26] by majority deputies on January 18, 2008, after the Académie française voiced their absolute disapproval[27][28] of so-called regional languages, which recognition they perceive as "an attack on French national identity".[29] On the UMP website[30], Nicolas Sarkozy denies any mistreatment of regional languages. In a pre-electoral speech in Besançon on March 13, 2007 he claimed: If I'm elected, I won't be in favour of the European Charter for Regional Languages. I don't want that tomorrow a judge with a historical experience of the issue of minorities different from ours, decides that a regional language must be considered as a language of the Republic just like French. Because, beyond the text itself, there is a dynamic of interpretations and jurisprudence that can go very far. I am convinced that in France, the land of the free, no minority is discriminated against and consequently it is not necessary to grant European judges the right to give their opinion on a matter that is consubstantial with our national identity and has absolutely nothing to do with the construction of Europe. His Socialist rival, Ségolène Royal, on the contrary, declares herself ready to sign the Charter in a March 2007 speech [31] in Iparralde for the sake of cultural variety in France: Regional identities represent a tremendous asset for the future and I believe that understanding the link between the fundamental values that make the deep-rooted identity between France and the French nation in its diversity, in its authenticity, in its authentic traditions [...] makes the State work well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha
Se bolèga, l'Occitània:
http://www.encyclopedia.com/video/dtT1qMqhL54-manifestacion-per-loccitan-carcassona.aspx
Only place in the world ,where Occitan is an official language (with Spanish and Calalan) is Aran Valley in Spain.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aranese_language
anybody ever get the feeling that french people have been brainwashed by their state?
Not to bash French people, but indeed, self-criticism is a taboo among francophones. I always get that impression when reading their wikipedia. About the Verghona is no French entry by the way, and when I read the entry about 'jacobinism', for instance, I only read some vague info about how French was made the only language of the centralized republic (nothing about the violent supression of minority groups even - albeit in lesser extent - until late in the '60s).
I HAVE, however, talked to French people who know the less good sides of their own history, so not all are ignorant (many are though). I'm not saying this because I feel my country is morally superior to France, there are just details that are very visible. Feel free to criticize Flemish people in a constructive way, I don't mind. One thing I'd like to mention. I AM noticing a switch in mentality among French people and francophones in general (Walloons are under strong French influence), they are starting to become more open-minded about foreign languages and more French people than ever are interesting in learning (minority) languages (still a small folkloric group, but bigger than before). |