Mother Tongues and Other Tongues
“Je n’ai qu’une langue et ce n’est pas la mienne”
“I have only the one language, and it is not mine,” stated Jacques Derrida, giving a paper at a bilingual conference held at the State University of Louisiana in April 1992, with the title 'Echoes from Nowhere/Renvois d’ailleurs'.1 The conference centred around the influence of French on other languages, the influence of other languages on French, and the various ‘kinds’ of French spoken around the world - one of those, of course, being Cajun, the ‘other’ language of Louisiana - a language as close to ‘proper’ French as Shakespearean English is to the language of the BBC News or The Washington Post, as anyone who’s tried their school French on a Cajun speaker will readily testify.
It is striking that the French set up a whole government institution2 to safeguard the purity of their language, and still appear to maintain a belief in France and Frenchness as something discrete and identifiable, speaking of ‘la France métropolitaine’ and ‘la France outre mer’3 - as though French Guiana or Martinique are no more markedly different than Paris or Provence. Whether this is to be admired or deplored is, perhaps, a discussion for another time.
Derrida himself was born in Algeria, that is, in France Outre Mer, as it was then, so he was conscious in his childhood that the French he spoke was not ‘proper’ French. This sense of dislocation was exacerbated by the fact that he was Jewish, in a period when that was, to say the least, an uneasy thing to be. In fact, although he was too young to be aware of it at the time, he, like all Jews in France and in French territories overseas during the Second World War, had no national identity at all, as the Vichy régime revoked their citizenship. At school, Derrida followed the same curriculum as any contemporary French schoolchild, while Arabic, the language spoken all around him in the streets, was taught as a foreign language, and ranked rather below ‘proper’ languages with ‘proper’ literatures, like German or Italian or Latin.
It is no wonder, then, that Derrida, in his subsequent career as a writer and teacher,4 took a wrecking ball to the French language as he sundered words and soldered them together in new ways, seeking to create a new vehicle in which he could drive forward new thinking.
But in truth Derrida’s dis-ease, his dis-content, was not just a product of his particular personal circumstances. Something more pervasive and more profound was gnawing away like an anxious little termite at the foundations of our trust in the reliability of language. A proper discussion of this dissolution of the solidity of words and meanings will be the subject of a future article.5 Sufficient now to tread with tiny tentative steps around the blurry borderlines between language, identity, and nationhood.
In a superb book published in 2009,6 Ardis Butterfield looks at the development of the French and English languages during the Hundred Years War. According to Butterfield’s convincing account, the evolution of these two languages and their relationship to each other was very little like the stories we were told in school. The story I previously had in my head (and which I am embarrassed to say I confidently shared with students) was that the English were all happily chatting away in Anglo-Saxon - or perhaps Early English - until the Norman Conquest in 1066, when the victorious7 French asserted the exclusive use of their language in all the domains that mattered - the court, the church and the law, domains in which, it can be argued, French-Norman Latinate language remains dominant to this day.
Not so, argues Butterfield. The state of affairs which prevailed in England and France in the tenth and eleventh centuries and beyond was far more fluid and flexible, with personal and national linguistic identities being, quite literally, all over the place. As the stunning map shown in the frontispiece to Butterfield’s book makes startlingly clear, while the ‘Kingdom of France’ might have appeared to have more or less the same boundaries as we would recognise today, in actual fact the area under the king’s direct control was tiny, including Paris and Orleans but not much else. The Duke of Burgundy commanded large swathes of land from Flanders right down to the Mediterranean, while the English king, through a series of inheritances and strategic marriages, held territory running from Normandy to the Pyrenees. The notion of ‘Englishness’ and ‘Frenchness’ was clearly a very slippery one. And yet, and yet…
By the time William Shakespeare was writing Henry V (c. 1600), something had clearly changed - in the play Henry exhorts his troops, ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our English dead’. They are fighting in France, but they are fighting as English - nationality and nationhood have become securely solidified, and the language along with it. But in the penultimate scene of the play, Shakespeare has Katherine, Henry’s betrothed, unable to understand English, while Henry confidently addresses her in fluent and eloquent French. A certain slipperiness lingers on, but with the emphasis, it seems, coming down on the primacy of English. Is it just me, or is this scene between Henry and Katherine just a tad patronising?
That said, it has to be acknowledged that there is a delightful cosiness in the familiarity of our mother tongue, no matter what tongue it is. We are so used to our mother tongue as our psychic ‘home’, where we can kick off our shoes, sit back, and take our ease, that it assumes a naturalness to us that precludes our seeing how that language, distinctive in its syntax and semantics, shapes our view of the world. What we far too easily lose sight of is that there are so many different linguistic ‘homes’ across our globe, each shedding different light on our common human experience, and contributing different elements to our human understanding. It would be good if we could visit each other’s ‘homes’ more often.
Derrida felt himself a foreigner, estranged, a stranger. Perhaps at least one contributory factor to the radical direction of his thinking was that he did not feel he had a linguistic home - ‘je n’ai qu’une langue et ce n’est pas la mienne’.
This conference was organised by Edouard Glissant and David Wills around the question of the influence of the French language outside France, with special emphasis on aspects of creolisation and bilingualism. Derrida’s paper was later published in an extended form as Le Monolinguisme de l’Autre ou le Prothèse d’Origine (Galilée, 1996), available in an English translation by Patrick Mensah as Monolingualism of the Other or The Prostheses of Origin (Stanford University Press, 1998). Whether you’re reading it in French or in English (or in yet a different translation), this is perhaps the most accessible of all Derrida’s writings.
l’Académie française, established by Cardinal Richelieu in 1635, « La principale fonction de l’Académie sera de travailler avec tout le soin et toute la diligence possibles à donner des règles certaines à notre langue et à la rendre pure, éloquente et capable de traiter les arts et les sciences » (article XXIV). À cet effet, « il sera composé un dictionnaire, une grammaire, une rhétorique et une poétique » (article XXVI), et seront édictées pour l’orthographe des règles qui s’imposeront à tous (article XLIV). In other words, ‘the main function of the Academy will be to work with every possible care and industry to lay down certain rules for our language, making it pure, eloquent and able to convey both the arts and the sciences…’ To this end, ‘a dictionary, a grammar, rhetorics and poetics will be composed, and rules laid down for spelling, which will apply across the board.’ [Author’s translation]
Metropolitan France and France Overseas.
He taught at the Sorbonne, the École Normale Supérieure, and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales.
What’s That? The Intolerable Wrestle with Words and Meanings (Forthcoming)
The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War, Ardis Butterfield (OUP, 2009)
For followers of Robin Hood and other nation-building myths, for ‘victorious’ read ‘beastly’.
Thank you, enlightening and intriguing.