“MICROACCENTS” IN FRANCE.

“MICROACCENTS” IN FRANCE. I posted recently about “microaccents.” I tend to think of France as one of the first nation states and therefore one that has been highly centralized for a long time. I shouldn’t. Fernand Braudel wrote in THE IDENTITY OF FRANCE about how long it actually took for France to establish a national identity. This weekend’s Financial Times had a review by John Thornhill of THE DISCOVERY OF FRANCE by Graham Robb, which quotes a traveler in the Pyrenees in 1837 as saying that each valley was a little world. Only about 11% of the population of France spoke French at the time of the French Revolution. There were some 55 major dialects and hundreds of subdialects. Just as a linguist could identify the block in the Bronx that Dick Weisfelder grew up in, the local patois would identify the neighborhood in France where you grew up.