French regional and minority language policy

If you believe that Brussels is more than happy to see powerful member states neutralised by internal division–as is increasingly Spain’s case–then it becomes easier to understand the promotion by official EU “news” agency Eurolang of a French electoral lobby devoted to obtaining official status for the country’s smaller languages. Like all European initiatives of this type, Le Pact des Langues (which doesn’t actually use any regional languages in its materials) follows an openly xenophobic agenda in excluding from consideration languages spoken by immigrants and their descendants.

I believe that Maghrebi Arab vernaculars are used by some three million French citizens (Ethnologue is, as is often the case, a couple of decades out of touch), constituting thus France’s principal minority language, and Paris’ major regional language after the lingua franca. If you’re going to go down this road, then why deprive these people of language rights to be allotted to the 100,000 odd Basque speakers in France? And why does the left continue to be so prominent in supporting the kind of discriminatory claptrap outlawed by any decent liberal constitution (OK, by the Dutch)?

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• Kurlansky / Basques / Wikipedia
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