A FRENCH PROPOSAL TO PROSCRIBE DISCRIMINATION BASED ON PRONUNCIATION. In this post, I reported on French efforts to have uniform words for new computer-related activities. In the post, I quoted a French official who said: “Language is what brought this country together.”
This article in Reuters (link via Instapundit) reports on the tensions which persist in France between centralizing insistence on correct pronunciation and local or regional accents. It begins: “A French member of parliament has proposed that mockery of accents be outlawed, after an irate politician derided a journalist’s southwestern pronunciation before asking if anyone had a question in ‘understandable French’.”
The proposed law would proscribe discrimination based on pronunciation, whether standardized or from a specific region of France, or from one of the countries of origin of the many people of African descent in France.