Conference Program

The legitimization of regional language varieties, advocated today by numerous speakers and specialists (Francart, 2010; Klinkenberg, 2015), is part of an ambitious societal project: to assign linguistic diversity a role as a guarantor of democracy.

It posits that, alongside national languages, representative of "nation-states," regional varieties, as well as dialects, deserve recognition because, in this era of globalization, the democratic challenge demands respect for cultural diversity.

"We should," says Francart, "perpetuate the use of a language that derives its legitimacy from its capacity to express the plural identity of the societies and individuals that compose it." “Belgian French, Quebec French, Louisiana French, Romansh, Sardinian, Neapolitan, Catalan, and other living variants of national languages ​​embody a civic and political issue: indeed, language mobilizes identity, social, cultural, and educational concerns. Allowing everyone to express themselves fosters pluralistic dialogue and debate. In schools, this issue allows for work on representations and examination of diaphasic varieties and appropriate, deliberate language choices.

In French-speaking Belgium, this evolution of attitudes necessitated a guilt-inducing questioning of the hegemony of the French of the Île-de-France region and its essentialist and unitarist definition (Klinkenberg, 2015), constructed by several centuries of idealizing and authoritarian discourse.” This process allowed for a disinhibition of "decentralized" Francophone communities with regard to the norm of standard French, and, freed from feelings of linguistic insecurity, they are now claiming liberated, authentic practices in addition to the official national language.

Methodologically, the exercise of linguistic awareness as a driving force for the identification and inclusion of regional varieties is essential because it consists, in particular, of "identifying the attitudes and representations that speakers have of their own speech and that of others" and, consequently, of "analyzing all the formal and semantic facets of verbal messages" (Alvarez-Peyrère, 1998). This vigilant reading is attentive to the moral, cultural, ideological, and emotional implications of the utterances.

We propose a review of these teaching practices conducted with future teachers.