Welcome to our first issue of the Language Exepress!

For me, languages have always been both a personal and a professional concern. My mother is French, my father is English; I had the privilege of growing up bilingual, and my choice to pursue a career in teaching and researching the French language and its culture was motivated in part by the desire to explore my own identity. Now I have my own bilingual children, and I wait with fascination to see what relationship they each develop to their different languages.

 

It is not necessary to dig very deep in order to uncover where the personal has informed and shaped my professional trajectory. My French grandparents were native speakers of Occitan, a Romance language which was the main tongue of southern France until their generation had it knocked out of them by the French educational system (they never passed it on to my mother). You can still occasionally hear Occitan spoken by the elderly on the market places of small southern towns, but despite a vibrant activist movement the language is struggling to thrive in the shadow of the national juggernaut that is French. In fact, to find the crowning glory of Occitan culture we need to go right back to the dazzling medieval poetry of the troubadours, which I have had the great pleasure of teaching to final-year students since I have been at Exeter.

 

Alongside troubadour poetry, one of my major objects of research at the moment is the French spoken and written in medieval Britain. It is not always appreciated that French was transmitted inter-generationally in Britain from the Norman Conquest until after the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century, and remained an important language of commerce, law and culture into the early modern period. The Anglo-French connection left its mark on the life and culture of these islands in many ways, right down to the language we use (for instance, ‘arrival’ and ‘departure’ both came into English from the French spoken in Britain – these words never existed in continental dialects of French).

 

Part of the reason I find this long history of English-French bilingualism so fascinating is because I’ve lived my own life with both these languages, and am now seeing their transmission into the next generation of my family. The medieval intellectual Isidore of Seville wrote in Book IX of his Etymologies that ‘nations came from languages, not languages from nations’. One might argue that both propositions have some truth in them, but I like Isidore’s emphasis on languages themselves as agents of identity and community, shaping the lives of the people who speak them – whether from birth or through education. Each of us has our own linguistic story which simultaneously sets us apart and binds us together with others; this is just one of the things that makes the study of languages such a vibrant, rewarding and necessary undertaking.

 

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