James Costa

Must we save the language? Children's discourse on language and community in Provençal and Scottish language revitalisation movements

This chapter intends to propose a critical analysis of the types of discourse articulated by children involved in language revitalisation programmes in two Western European contexts, Provence (South-eastern France) and Southern Scotland. It will focus on how the minority language (Occitan and Scots) is described and on what implications this has on the children"s categorising the various language groups (language and speech communities) where they are socialised.

Of all the social actors involved in language revitalisation programmes, and despite the central part they play, children are the only ones whose opinion on participation is never required. In fact, children occupy a very ambiguous place in language revitalisation movements: on the one hand, they are perceived as the embodiment of the future of the language involved, and consequently of the group that speaks it. Yet on the other hand they are often accused of not speaking the minority language properly -i.e. usually, with the right accent -or of mixing minority and dominant languages. Consequently, in my experience first as a teacher and then as a sociolinguist in both Scotland and Provence, I have found that adults tend to look on them with a fair amount of suspicion. This seems a fairly widespread pattern in Europe, where "neo-speakers" in general are considered with defiance (for an example in Brittany, see Hornsby, 2005: 195-199 in particular).

When concerned with children, sociolinguistic work on language revitalisation has concentrated on patterns of language acquisition or on bilingualism, and very rarely, if ever, on the discourse that the children involved in such programmes articulate. This mirrors a tendency in anthropology to avoid considering the points of view expressed by children, so much so that the anthropologist Lawrence Hirschfield (2002) wrote an article he entitled "Why don"t anthropologists like children?" 2 . Yet, according to the author, "anthropology is premised on a process that children do better than almost all others, namely, acquire cultural knowledge" (Hirschfield, 2002: 624).

. In her 1985 article, Fabre seeks to assess the ways in which local children consider their own speech and the opinion they have of Occitan, the local language. Her focus remains however the language, and not the children themselves.

1 I am grateful to Alexandre Duchêne and Julia Sallabank for their insightful comments on

In contrast, this chapter focuses on the very discourses of children, asking a set of crucial questions: What do they have to say about the minority languages they are made to study? How does this shape their understanding of their human environment? And, last but not least, in what way is it relevant to the academic study of language revitalisation? I will concentrate on data collected during interviews with groups of three to five children aged nine to eleven while doing ethnographic fieldwork between 2007 and 2009 in and around two primary schools: the first one was an Occitan immersion school situated in northern Provence, and the second was an ordinary state-funded primary school located in central Scotland. A comparative approach was particularly useful for identifying community belonging and shaping as a sensitive issue the children had to deal with in everyday life.

While geographically unrelated, language issues in Provence and Scotland bear many resemblances. In particular, in both settings language advocates make strong references to the prestigious literary past of Occitan and Scots. The relation of both languages to the now dominant languages, English and French, is also very similar. Typological similarities between minority and majority languages enable the development of specific discourses caused by this proximity. This results in the use of such terms as patois or semi-language, and both Scots and Occitan are often referred to as corrupt varieties of the dominant languages. Yet both speech varieties evolved in different ideological contexts, making comparisons relevant in highlighting how pupils in both contexts react and relate in different ways to dominant ideologies of language.

As I have argued elsewhere [START_REF] Costa | Revitalisation linguistique: Discours, mythe et idéologie. Approche critique de mouvements de revitalisation en Provence et en Ecosse[END_REF], language revitalisation movements are not merely about "restoring language", whatever that may mean locally. They are primarily about semiotising and reinvesting linguistic forms made relevant by groups of activists to the invention of a new social project, in which groups are redefined and group belonging is reshaped according to linguistic criteria. Language revitalisation movements are part of contact processes where (minority) groups are shaped according to criteria set to enable them to renegotiate terms of contact with another, "dominant" or "majority" group. As such, they are social movements where language is one primary focus of thought and action.

In their sociology textbook on social movements, Della [START_REF] Porta | Social Movements: An Introduction[END_REF] identify three main features characterising such movements:

-they are "involved in conflictual relations with clearly identified opponents"; -they are "linked by dense informal networks"; -they "share a distinct collective identity" (Della Porta and Diani, 2006: 20).

While the first two features apply to language revitalisation movements, the third feature is particularly problematic. In the case of revitalisation movements, that "distinct collective identity" is often still a project, central to the shaping of collective action, and a central issue to the enterprise.

Children are pivotal in this process. As such, an analysis of their discourse on language and other speakers of the minority language is of particular interest for at least two reasons:

-it sheds light on the types of discourse circulating among adults, and on the elements which adults deem relevant to pass on; -it gives us insights as to how new categories of belonging connected to language are integrated in the everyday lives of children, and how those categories shape their socialisation as members of those linguistic groups in the making. Such work is essential particularly among older children in a given school, as their discourse reflects the types of discourse that might get passed on to younger pupils outside the classroom, and outwith the reach of teachers. Children may move on, grow up, forget the minority language, yet discourses on language remain and endure in schools among younger generations, so that beyond idiosyncrasies, more stable elements might be discernable.

As such, narratives of revitalisation, particularly among the young, afford us an opportunity to analyse the types of language ideologies circulating in language-based social movements in condensed form, a form deemed suitable to be transmitted to the next generations. In this chapter, language ideologies are to be understood as a shared body of ideas mediating forms of speech (and in this case, language choices) and social structure [START_REF] Kroskrity | Language Ideologies[END_REF], in other words a set of naturalised ideas underpinning as well as shaping discourse.

In order to analyse ideologies of group belonging and conceptualising with respect to language practice, I will first explore the discourse of children on language itself, and will then proceed onto examining how this discourse shapes their views of groups and communities around them.

USING A MINORITY LANGUAGE AT SCHOOL

The next two sections will provide background information on the types of schools I studied, and will show instances of children"s discourse on the languages they teach.

Teaching (through) minority languages in Provence and Scotland

The data I analyse in the next sections were collected in semi-structured interviews conducted between 2007 and 2009. The schools where I completed my study were distinct from neighbouring schools in their own ways:

-the children in Provence attended a Calandreta primary school 3 , an immersive bilingual school founded by an association of parents and running mostly through the medium of Occitan (locally known as Provençal 4 , a term generally used by the children themselves);

3 "Calandreta" is an association running dozens of immersion schools throughout the South of France. This system concerns over 2000 pupils across a vast area encompassing the regions of Provence, Languedoc, Gascony, Limousin and Auvergne. As little literature exists on those schools, readers interested in the subject are directed to the schools" website: http://c-oc.org/calandreta/ as well as to [START_REF] Dompmartin-Normand | Collégiens issus de Calandreta : quelles représentations de l'occitan ?[END_REF]), Boyer (2005) or [START_REF] Sumien | Comment rendre l'occitan disponible? Pédagogie et diglossie dans les écoles Calandretas[END_REF]. The first two articles are concerned with the discourse of former Calandreta pupils, the third one with Calandreta teacher training. 4 A strong controversy emerged at the turn of the millennium in some circles in Provence as to whether Provençal should be considered a language in its own right or a dialect of a wider language, Occitan (see [START_REF] Blanchet | Provençal as a distinct language? Sociolinguistic patterns revealed by a recent public and political debate[END_REF][START_REF] Costa | Revitalisation linguistique: Discours, mythe et idéologie. Approche critique de mouvements de revitalisation en Provence et en Ecosse[END_REF] for differing analyses). In this chapter I use both terms interchangeably and consider Provençal as the Occitan variety spoken in Provence, as does the Calandreta federation.

-those in Scotland attended a school where teachers had initially introduced Scots 5 in some classes, then gradually in all aspects of education and everyday life, in order to sustain literacy skills among pupils (in the view of teachers, pupils suffered from the distance between their own speech and the Standard English of school, hindering their general progress). In this respect, the two contexts are fairly different. While the Calandreta teaches most subjects through Occitan, and although pupils in Scotland are entitled to use Scots at all times, there are only a few dedicated Scots-language moments per week. In terms of initial language proficiency, both contexts are also very different. It can safely be said that no child, save rare exceptions, come to the Calandreta with any working knowledge of Occitan, although for some the language might be present in their environment through family or neighbours. In the Scottish school on the other hand, teachers and other educators broadly speaking consider that most children speak a variety of Scots at home. In fact, they tend to categorise as Scots any production containing elements of non-standard language.

These differences highlight another fundamental difference, residing in the approach to language. The approach to Occitan is heavily normative while the attitude to norm in Scots is more relaxed. The dominant attitude towards Scots since the early 2000s has been to accept any form that children might know, and to let them write in whichever way they find meaningful. Those forms may then be discussed in class. Normative ideologies are therefore less present among pupils in Scotland.

This has considerable implications as to who counts as a speaker of Occitan or Scots: while speaking Occitan is submitted to considerable evaluative activity, speaking Scots tends to be much more broadly conceived. In other words, language proficiency is not the only criterion for identifying someone as a speaker of Scots. Whereas Occitan is regularly reported as being spoken by some three million people [START_REF] Sibille | Les Langues Régionales[END_REF], and Scots by well over a million people [START_REF] Mcclure | Why Scots Matters[END_REF], the structure of those populations of speakers, their motivations and patterns of language use differ radically, as will become obvious through analysing the discourse of children. Occitan might be well established as a "language", it is seldom heard in public. The status of Scots is far more insecure, yet varieties subsumed under that label can be heard throughout Scotland on an everyday basis. In other words, comparing the discourse of children in both contexts provides very diverse examples of how school pupils problematise "community" in language revitalisation processes.

Schools are heavily constrained places 6 where ideologies of language are inculcated, reproduced, and rarely challenged. Discourse elicited from such places is therefore itself dependent on such constraints, and it is likely that children speak more or less freely. Yet as will be seen children retain a degree of agency in the shaping of their own narratives, in which elements are borrowed from both discourse on minority and dominant language, and others are formed locally.

Narrating revitalisation

5 Scots regroups the Germanic vernacular varieties spoken in Scotland. There is an ongoing linguistic and sociolinguistic debate as to whether it constitutes an autonomous language or a set of eccentric varieties of English (see [START_REF] Millar | An Historical National Identity? The Case of Scots[END_REF][START_REF] Mcclure | Why Scots Matters[END_REF].

6 "Places" are to be understood in this context as "spaces made social, hence becoming a space in which humans make social, cultural, political and historical investments" (Blommaert 2008, 211).

The children I interviewed had been mustered by their teachers into groups of three to six, and questions concerned primarily their own experience with the "new" language and the programme they were involved in. In this chapter, I focus on one group in each context.

In Provence, the children chose to use Occitan as the language of interview, whereas in Scotland using Scots was not an option, for an array of reasons -in particular, being an outsider to their normal group of socialisation, I might not have been perceived as a legitimate speaker. Also, the interviews took place inside the school, a place where Standard English is still perceived to be the legitimate variety in Scotland. Using Scots would have also meant raising many questions as to what the children speak, and as to how they might have reacted to my using a brand of Scots learnt from a book.

The children in Scotland had been following Scots language workshops for several months, concentrating on reading and writing. Interviews in Scotland were conducted with the assistance of MF, a prominent Scots language writer who had been teaching the Scots classes in the school in the previous term. The pupils in Provence had been in the Calandreta school for four to seven years, depending on whether they had been to the Calandreta pre-primary school or not.

Talking about the language itself proved a source of great satisfaction for children in both locations, and all were enthusiastic about recounting their feelings and ideas on that topic. In Provence for example, one pupil, Léa, explicitly refers to "saving" Provençal. This is part of a conversation with another pupil, Carla, as they argue over the place Provençal should have in public life. The following extract is part of a onehour long interview with three girls, Carla, Léa and Sarah. Only Carla and Léa interact here. Two distinct parts can be identified in this extract, enacting two different types of voices. One voice represents widely circulating language activists" discourse (lines 2 to 7), as exemplified in Carla and Léa"s proclaiming of Provençal as beautiful. This standard piece of discourse echoes other studies on language revitalisation where children are socialised into ideologies of minority languages as beautiful (Friedman, 2011: 641). The other voice exemplifies the children"s own voice (line 1, and lines 8 to 12).

Extract n°1:

From line 2 to line 6, the children are re-entextualising discourse, i.e. lifting texts out of their original interaction contexts and making them relevant to new texts and contexts [START_REF] Bauman | Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life[END_REF]. They are transforming discourse widely circulating in minority language activist circles and made available to them to reframe in a meaningful way. In this particular case, they are framing language contact in terms of conflict and competition. This, children accomplish through summoning the voice of their teacher, Daniel, who represents an authoritative view on language -the only such view most children are ever exposed to. This view situates Provençal with respect to both French and English, in such a way that constructs children as defenders of that language -a role Léa and Carla are apparently willing to endorse. The defence of Provençal occurs in a military setting, where other languages are ascribed agentivity, and can "invade" the territory of weaker language. The minority language is thus implicitly framed as a special and rare item entrusted to children, who in turn live in a world where they are surrounded by monolingual others, known only though the language they speak.

The world where the children evolve is thus one where languages are items deserving preservation, in a world where dominant others prey on smaller languages. Yet the reasons for this remain unclear -hence the development of a number of empirical (and essentially idiosyncratic) arguments for "saving Provençal".

As mentioned above, at the beginning of the extract Léa (referring to what Carla said before) presents us with an aesthetic judgement on language: Provençal is "a beautiful language" (line 1). While participating in a very common set of discourse, Léa thus chose to convoke very subjective (and to her more meaningful) reasons rather than the universalistic claims circulating among militants (such as the benefits of worldwide linguistic diversity).

Meaning is also constructed through debate on the status of languages in conflict. From lines 8 to 12, Carla and Léa develop their own argument over responses to the dominance of French, with two different types of arguments. While Carla extends the "invasion" metaphor and argues in favour of increased linguistic homogeneity through the imposition of Provençal throughout France, Léa insists apparently on a more generous point of view, "a little bit of everything everywhere". However, while both pupils are able to express themselves in both French and Provençal, they do not present bilingualism as an option. Instead, they display a view on languages in contact as juxtaposed entities, and frame languages as autonomous entities without consideration for the individuals or groups who speak them. Carla finally links language and territory (line 12) in a way common among proponents of minority language groups in Europe, while still ignoring actual speakers.

Interestingly also, Carla refers to Provence, a term attached to lived everyday experience, rather than to "Occitania", a historical, linguistic and geographical construct promoted by the Occitan language movement and encompassing all Occitan-speaking regions. In doing this, she relates with her own experience outside school time rather than to the types of discourse she is exposed to in class.

The discourse developed by Carla and Léa is both embedded in the one they hear at school, and yet it expands in an autonomous way and is subject to debate among the children. This allows both girls to develop their own position as regards subjects such as linguistic diversity and global linguistic conflict. This is however set within a wider frame of conflict, as promoted within the Occitan language movement, and Carla and Léa"s discourse remains largely disembodied, with speakers conspicuously absent from their debate.

The next extract from Scotland provides the first replies to my questions on the nature of Scots8 . I had initially expected very similar responses to those collected in Provence. Yet it soon became apparent that language was conceptualised in a significantly different way. Teachers in the school also advocated "saving Scots", as a sign proclaimed in one classroom, yet for the children this did not appear to be a pressing issue. To them, this was the language they all spoke it on an everyday basis, and Scots was understood to be simply a new label reframing their speech from "slang" to "language". Scots just was, and if it had to be anything, then it was "rude", "broad", "coarse", "posh" or, as in the next extract, "popular". Language is therefore not characterised for itself, it is correlated to social and moral evaluations. Scots is presented as evolving in a lived in social space, with both Connor and Teresa talking about it not in abstract terms but in relation to speakers, and to a social reality they can refer to. This compares strikingly with the abstract language conjured by Carla and Léa above.

Extract n°2

In their opposition between a present that allows public use of Scots ("noo" [now], line 3) and a past that did not, Connor and Teresa too replicate the discourse of language activists. Yet, the past they refer to corresponds to a reality they had themselves experienced or one that had been narrated to them by parents or older siblings. Until very recently, using dialectal forms was strictly forbidden in schools and in all formal settings in Scotland9 , and this situation still endures across many parts of the country, as I witnessed myself in several other schools.

The discourse on language serves to express a discourse on shifting authority between a "before" where Scots was banned and associated with uncouth speech, and a today where it is "authorised", and where previous structures are replaced by potential agentivity. In Teresa"s words, she now has arguments to legitimise her own speech when told off by adults. This possibility is afforded by the presence of an even greater authority, school and Scots language classes taught by a famous writer.

The shifting of authority takes place against the backdrop of a densely populated social landscape, expressed through the "popularity" of Scots at school, through the presence of an authority allowing or disallowing the use of Scots in schools, and through the existence of individuals criticising the linguistic choices of children. This short piece of narrative on Teresa and Connor"s view on vernacular forms of speech relates to a thriving community outside the school walls for whom the vernacular is either an interest or a concern.

Carla and Léa conceptualised language as an object, a threatened entity adults had entrusted them with, yet a strangely disembodied object. Conversely, Teresa and Connor focus on language practice, group categorisation and social evaluation on part of all too real Others, and construe their participation in the Scots language movement as empowering and relevant to their daily lives. Such opposing views on language (as object vs. as practice) unsurprisingly bear on how the children construct the groups they belong to or evolve in, as I will show in the next section.

CONJURING GROUPS THROUGH LANGUAGE

Social movements based on language project an idea (and an ideal) of the group they claim to represent. At the same time, their discourse is performative: it seeks to bring into existence the very groups it designates or describes (see Bourdieu, 1991: 221 and 223-224). The analysis of how groups are invented through language is therefore central to an understanding of language revitalisation movements, as such discursive moments reveal who is part of them and who isn"t. Discourse on groups is therefore central to the analysis of ideologies associated with language social movements.

To understand how children in Provence and Scotland involved in language revitalisation programmes construct the linguistic worlds in which they evolve, it is important to bring in a distinction between language communities and speech communities (section 3.1). This will allow us to analyse why pupils in both settings talk about their linguistic environments in the way they do (sections 3.2 and 3.3). [START_REF] Silverstein | Contemporary Transformations of Local Linguistic Communities[END_REF] distinguishes between two types of groups based on language, "language communities" and "speech communities". According to him, language communities are "groups of people by degree evidencing allegiance to norms of denotational […] language usage, however much or little such allegiance also encompasses an indigenous cultural consciousness of variation and/or change, or is couched in terms of fixity and stasis" (Silverstein, 1998: 402). "Denotational language usage" here stands for "language" in the most common sense of the term in the Western world, i.e. allegiance to a set of more or less fixed grammatical forms, forms of speech usually "influenced by explicitly codified registers deemed […] correct or standard […]" (Silverstein, 1996: 129). In short, those are the standard languages as we know them, set as an ideal for minority languages by generations of sociolinguists working along the lines of a Fishmanian paradigm -a current particularly strong in Catalan and Occitan sociolinguistics (see [START_REF] Sumien | La standardisation pluricentrique de l'occitan : nouvel enjeu sociolinguistique, développement du lexique et de la morphologie[END_REF] on the creation of seven distinct yet interrelated regional norms for Occitan). Language communities are thus largely imagined communities based on a shared charter myth founding the group around language.

Language and speech communities

Speech communities, in contrast, "[indicate] that there are perduring, presupposable regularities of discursive interaction in a group or population" (Silverstein, 1998: 407). They are communities of everyday shared practice, and can involve several "languages".

In an ideal situation (as defined by most European language revitalisation movements), both types of communities should coincide with one other within a welldefined territory, and preferably under one political (and linguistic) authority. Schools are central places where this ideal model is presented as an actual reality, and through the construction of a closed educational community, revitalisation movements can perform such imagined schemes (e.g. through textbooks, advertising material or school language policy), hoping to make them eventually happen throughout their target society.

In most cases this remains a political ideal and project rather than a social reality. Minority language communities remain for the most part theoretical, and speech communities are dwindling everywhere in Europe. In this respect, a contrastive analysis of the Occitan and Scottish (Scots) cases is of particular interest to study the internal dynamics of language revitalisation movements and minority-group formation. In the Occitan case over 150 years of activism have succeeded in shaping a "language" as a set of norms of denotational usage, with well established (yet often competing) standards, dictionaries and grammars, but with less and less regular discursive interaction taking place outwith limited settings such as language activists" meetings. Scots, on the other hand, barely exists as a denotational standardised code (see for instance the TNS-BMRB [2010,15] Scottish Government survey, indicating that "The majority of adults in the sample [64%] agree that they do not think of Scots as a language"10 ). Non-standard forms of speech (i.e. Scots, according to Scots language movements) are however the everyday medium of communication across many parts of Scotland, and certainly so in the small Central-belt town where I conducted my fieldwork.

In the next section, I set out to explore the ways in which the children I interviewed used language to construct groups as categories relevant to their understanding of the world. More specifically, I show that for a number of reasons, the pupils cannot identify with the construct of the militants to superpose language and speech communities.

Looking for a speech community

Here I wish to show that the idea of a language community remains obscure (but constantly invoked by those in authority) for the pupils of the Provençal school, while their construction of a speech community is only tentative, and generally restricted not even to the school, but to the classroom.

The following extract follows extract 1 (Carla and Léa) chronologically, and provides an example of how both pupils debate on issues of language conflict and the social presence of Provençal outwith the classroom.

SPEAK PROVENÇAL

As we saw above (section 2.2), both girls agree on the necessity to "save Provençal", which, like saving the whales, is presented as a natural and obvious thing to do. How to proceed is however cause for debate, or at least reveals conflicting ideas on the nature of the group that is supposed to use the minority languages, and on its relations with the dominant language.

Léa presents languages as interchangeable: if French were the minority language, she would learn it all the same, framing the question in terms of equity in language diversity and relativising the beauty argument. Carla, on the other hand, presents herself as a language advocate, and argues in favour of concrete measures of language planning, namely getting people to speak the language outside the classroom.

In doing so, Léa and Carla present two outlooks on the linguistic situation of France, and on the Provençal speech community understood in this case as the total number of people in their environment capable of holding a conversation in Provençal. While Léa displays a certain awareness that they, as schoolchildren learning Provençal, act as little else than a piece of equipment used to convey and support language (lines 1-4), Carla views their role as a potentially active one. What she advocates is for people to be told to use the language in everyday life; yet, and rather ambiguously, her use of impersonal forms ("fau" one should or must, lines 5 and 9) contrasts with both the active language of Léa (e.g. "diriam" we would say, line 3] and her own ("entendem jamai" we never hear, line 8). The pupils" experienced reality thus highlights the distance with an ideal world, the coming of which is left to the actions of hypothetical "others". In fact, those "others" can only be conjectural, since, as Carla states, they never hear Provençal outside the school; it is therefore quite likely that both girls would find it practically difficult to identify those who ought to save the language.

A further ambiguity lies in Carla"s use of the imperative "parlatz provençau", speak Provençal (line 10) to encourage people to use the language, indicating that she assumes people are capable of speaking it. This suggests either that she has never tried to use Provençal outside school time, or that she is unaware of the processes that led to language minorisation and to her own subsequent learning of it.

This extract points to a linguistic inside, the (effectively) bilingual school, and to a linguistic outside, where use of French is not only the norm but also possibly, with some level of uncertainty, the only available medium for general communication. In effect, Léa and Carla"s understanding of the Provençal speech community is reduced to the school, and possibly, given the quasi-absence of use of Provençal during recess, to the classroom. This leaves pupils with an idea of an imagined and rather mythical language community based on a "language" they have little first-hand experience of outside school time, Occitan or Provençal (a distinction that remains unclear for most), and a speech community limited to a small group of peers. This inevitably raises some questions as to the role of immersion in education in cases where intergenerational linguistic links no longer favour using the minority language as a primary medium of communication. Indeed, revitalisation processes are presented in Provence as a way to restore a broken link between the language of the people and the children who are said to have lost de language.

In fact, both pupils mention some contact with Provençal outside the school, but it remains sporadic, and often raises questions about their own speech as it is often met with incomprehension. Léa exchanges a few formulaic phrases with an older gentleman at her music club, and Carla occasionally speaks some Provençal with an uncle living further south, but says she doesn"t really understand him. I suggest this latter issue strengthens the pupils" sense of community around the classroom.

The speech community issue resurfaced later during the interview, as we discussed the case of a local woman, Mrs R., a native speaker of Occitan whom I had met for another interview a year before, when she was 87. I presented the children with an audio extract of the interview, in which Mrs R. recounted in Provençal a dream she had had a few nights before. When I explained that she had only learnt French at school at the age of ten, the pupils expressed bewilderment: This extract apparently depicts the pupils" encounter with a reality they had not been aware of, namely the existence of people who had learnt French at school. The "monoglot speaker of Provençal" type is seemingly absent from the pupils" own conceptualisation of the Occitan or Provençal language community. This is not surprising given the Calandreta schools" emphasis on the value of bilingualism; yet it also displays a lack of awareness of the process of language change that took place throughout the 20 th century, a central element in the charter myth of the Occitan language movement (see [START_REF] Merle | Culture occitane per avançar[END_REF] for a collection of accounts on those processes, exemplifying how common those narratives are among native speakers).

The pupils" "how lucky!" (lines 3 and 4) is difficult to interpret in this context, and should probably not be understood as a praise for a time when people could be monoglot speakers of Occitan. Yet the revelation of a time when the use of the language they are learning as pupils was widespread enough for monolingual speakers to exist certainly opened up a new dimension in their representation of Occitan as a language, and as their language. In fact, they switch to French upon hearing about the elderly woman"s linguistic history, illustrating the contrast between their participation in a plurilingual speech community rather than in a monolingual one. Later during the interview, Carla expressed her wish to have been born at the same time as Mrs R., displaying perhaps less empathy towards Mrs R. and her own personal sociolinguistic story as a regret of not being able to participate in similar socialisation networks.

On a more general level, these excerpts show how children involved in a programme of minority language revitalisation react to both the aim of activists to bring into existence both a language community and its corresponding speech community or communities and to the awareness of their solitude as speakers of Provençal. In short, the categories adults promote remain abstract to them, and the 11 While this last segment literally means: "before, I speak Provençal", I interpreted it as meaning "she only spoke Provençal" and reformulated it thus (line 2). The pupils aligned with my reformulation apparently without any problem.

give and take of everyday life implies the construction of a speech community where both French and Provençal are used not according to rules set by the institution, but according to emerging interactional patterns depending on factors such as interlocutors, moments, place etc. as I was able to observe during my time in the school.

Articulating existing speech communities with a newfound language community

The Scottish situation provides an interesting contrast to the Provençal one. According to the children themselves, there is no shortage of people who understand or speak what they now call Scots, whether at school, at home or more generally throughout Scotland. There is therefore an easily identifiable "Scots" speech community in the immediate environment. However, the introduction by language advocates of the term "Scots" to replace what the children formerly identified as "Scottish", "slang" or referred to as "just the way we speak" implies the merging of the local speech community into a wider language community, distinct from the English language community. This provides pupils with a new array of categorising terms they can use to shape community membership around them, and leaves them with the task of articulating both types of community. In the following extract, the children express their lack of confidence as to who is concerned or not by the "Scots language" label. In questionnaires I had asked them to complete, most pupils wrote "Scots" as their home language. Yet it remained unclear throughout both the interviews and my observations what reality this term addressed. In the extract above, as I raise a generational issue, Robert links knowledge of Scots with formal education, without however specifying what he means by "knowing Scots". What this reveals however is a certain unawareness of the full extent of language registers used by other generations, a fact confirmed through further observations. In fact, Scots, whatever it might refer to, is widely used among peers, whereas vernacular forms tend to be shunned in the family for intergenerational use, with children being told to "speak properly".

This however leads to a strong paradox: while language advocates present Scots as the language the children use everyday, it is however connected to formal education and to acquisition at school. While the children previously experienced a dichotomy between the high variety of the school and the everyday vernacular they used among peers, that latter variety is suddenly given high status and presented to them in written form. In other words, Scots comes to designate both the everyday vernacular of the children and the prestige variety found in books, a duality that needs accommodating to by the children.

When Robert depicts Scots as spoken mainly by young people (lines 6-8), he is therefore keeping to safety, and referring to a speech community consisting mainly of his peers, without voicing too much of an opinion regarding the membership (or not) of adults. I suggest the children are developing a view on what their Scots speech community is from their own experience at school and with peers, leaving their linguistic contact with other vernacular speakers aside because of the ambiguous nature of Scots, standing between its status as a written medium and as an everyday language. This in turn underlines the insecure (and recent) nature of their representation of the Scots language community they are presented with at school. A representation that further destabilises their perception of the speech communities they take part in. Throughout interviews and observations, the children used the term Scottish rather than Scots, possibly illustrating further their insecurity with regard to the latter term.

CONCLUSION

Speech and language communities are places of socialisation for children, and the importance of how they are presented and represented should not be underestimated. Language revitalisation movements typically aim at destabilising existing views on such communities to replace them with others. Those other representations, being in essence mainly discursive and not (fully) effective in practice, potentially leave much space for insecurity as they replace existing frameworks of thought. The new categories proposed by adults are not fully functional, so that children must adapt them or create new ones, perhaps temporarily, to get on with the give and take of everyday life -to quote the title of Bambi Schieffelin"s (1990) famous book on language socialisation.

Overall, the children I interviewed seemed happy to participate in such experiences -or experimentations -and never questioned their participation in such schemes. However, taking part in such programmes demands a strong capacity for adaptation and interpretation, as the often unclear views of adults, be it on language, community or any other matter, are projected on the children without any further consideration. The issue of the target groups where children are to be socialised is never raised, and it is assumed that they will integrate in a local community without any particular reflection about its nature.

One conclusion I draw from my work in Provence and Scotland concerns the importance of paying attention to the discourse of children. Not only does it reflect the discourse of adults, and the ideologies it is premised upon -in this case the necessity to make language and speech communities coincide -but it also reveals how children adapt the categories of adults to their own everyday reality. That reality is not one of language advocacy, or of language revitalisation, hence possibly the lack of discussion about language among children. Those languages have become their owns, and they need not justify themselves about this, unlike adults perhaps. What they need to deal with is how to categorise their environment, and how language fits in that categorising process.

A second conclusion concerns the importance of comparative work. Contrasting such different contexts as the Provençal and Scottish ones highlights different processes taking place under a similar ideological matrix, namely the necessity to make speech and language communities coincide. In this, social movements based on language seek to imitate processes of nation-state construction, which points to the fundamentally modernist nature of language revitalisation movements. Other areas still need investigating, in particular the role of the written word in both programmes.

Finally, in terms of analysing language revitalisation, and language revitalisation movements, this chapter raises several questions, in particular about the socialisation of children into groups that are still mostly imaginary (i.e. they are in the process of being created) and into wider (e.g. regional, or national) language or speech communities. This dimension is rarely taken into account in the conception and implementation of language immersion programmes, especially in contexts where the target language is no longer a language of everyday use. This is especially true, I suggest, in cases where pupils are likely to cease being exposed to language revitalisation programmes (and to a more or less normative, or academic, version of the language) after primary school (this is especially the case of Provençal). More research needs to be conducted with regard to long-term consequences of short-lived language immersion at primary level, with current research so far (Boyer, 2005) highlighting only lingering memories of good times and very little language practice beyond school years.

7 1 Léa perdequé en mai es una coma ditz carla es una bela lenga because

also it is as carla says a beautiful language

2

/ fau la sauvar tròbe perdequé it should be saved i think because

3 Int. fau la sauvar? de que vòu dire fau la sauvar? it

should be saved ? what does it mean it should be saved ?

4 Léa ben / coma dire la sauvar / fau pas la laissar tombar fau / well

			everything
	6	Carla	[òc / nos a
			[yes daniel
	7		dich aquò danieu
			told us that
	8	Léa	o: lo francés envaïr tota la frança

/ how can i say to save it / we shouldn't let it down we should 5 au contrari fau pas laissar per exemple l'anglés [envaír tot on the contrary we shouldn't let for example english [invade 7 Int. stands for "Interviewer"; Daniel is the name of the class teacher. /, // and /// stand for breaks, and capitalisation indicates an emphasis by the pupils on a particular term or sentence. Italics indicate use of French. or french invade all of France 9 Carla es lo provençau que fau que envaís tota la frança it is provençal which should invade all of France 10 Léa ben justament sariá pas tròp ben tanben aquí faudriá que y well precisely that wouldn't so good also there it would be 11 ait que y ait un pichòt de tot de'n partot better if there were a bit of everything everywhere 12 Carla ben tota la provença / provençau well in all of provence / provençal

Extract 3 1 Léa imagina / aquí lo français seriá lo provençau a la plaça imagine

	5	Carla	mai dau provençau fau que [se sòrt
			but about provençal it must [get out
	6	Léa	[ieu tròbe
			[I think
	7	Carla	parce

/ here french would be provençal instead

2

dau français e que lo français eh ben sariá lo provençau of french and french well would be the provençal 3 qu'eriam en trin de l'aprendre / eh ben diriam parier diriam that we would be learning / well we'd say the same we'd say 4 qu'es una polida lenga que faudriá la la sauvar that it is a pretty language that should be saved

que es que dins lei classas calandretas senon i a jamai because

it is only in the calandreta classes otherewise there 8 de de de entendem jamai parlar de gens defòra / provençau is never we never hear people talk outside / provençal 9

donca:s fau que parlon encara provençau de gens / fau cridar so

they should speak provençal people / we should shout 10 PARLATZ PROVENÇAU ((laughter))

ce que je vous dit 1921 22 quelque chose comme ça

			TEN years / before I speak provençal 11
	2	Int.	parlava QUE provençau
			she spoke ONLY provençal
	3	Carla	la cha::nce
			how lucky
	4	Carla,	la chance
		Lea &	how lucky
		Sarah
	5	Carla	elle est née quand?
			when was she born?
	6	Int.	elle a vuechanta vuech ans doncas elle est née en 1921 euh
			she is eighty eight so she was born in 1921 er
	7		qu'est-what am I talking about 1921 22 something like that
	8	Carla	ouh la la
			oooh
	9	Léa	en 1921
			in 1921
	10	Carla	21
			21
	Extract 4
	1	Carla	DETZ ANS / avans parli provençau

Note that my own use of the term "Scots language" was dictated by the context, where the "Scots language" syntagm was the norm set to become dominant by teachers and the school administration.

See Williamson (1982[START_REF] Williamson | Lowland Scots in Education: An Historical Survey (2)[END_REF] for a historical account of the ban on vernacular forms in education in Scotland.

This survey should however be taken very cautiously, as the very notion of language is not defined. The statement to which the population sample was to react was thus phrased: "I don"t really think of Scots as a language, it"s more just a way of speaking" (TNS-BMRB, 2010, 15).


James Costa
email: james.costa@ens-lsh.fr

Language endangerment and revitalisation as elements of regimes of truth: Shifting terminology to shift perspective

Keywords: Language revitalisation, language endangerment, discourses of endangerment, regimes of truth, sociolinguistics, social theory

This paper seeks to explore how the language endangerment/revitalisation discourse was gradually established as a new Foucauldian regime of truth. I characterise this regime of truth as one that not only essentialises the link between language and community, but also as one that constructs communities as homogeneous and seeks to minimise internal and external conflict. Through the example of how this discourse is becoming dominant in France, I then suggest that there are alternative ways of looking at minority language processes, and draw on works developed in France in the 1980s in the Occitan school of sociolinguistics to propose an approach centred on social actors and processes rather than on languages. I thus propose that one way of analyzing (and responding to) 'language endangerment' may reside in looking at it from a different perspective such as the one developed by Robert Lafont around the Occitan case.

Introduction: Language endangerment and revitalisation as regimes of truth

What we now call language revival movements originated in nineteenth century Europe and have existed for over 150 years. They can be defined as a type of social movement that justifies its proposed action on the basis of a semiotisation of language in discourse. That is to say, such movements mobilise language in order to voice concerns (and demands) of a social nature, such as issues of social class, inequality, domination and so forth.

The terminology now in use in academia to describe such processes, namely language revitalisation, understood as a reaction to language endangerment, has only become current over the past twenty years [START_REF] Hale | Endangered languages[END_REF] is often quoted as the catalyst of the contemporary concern with language endangerment).

In this context, both 'endangerment' and 'revitalisation' function as keywords, in the sense of [START_REF] Williams | Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society[END_REF] -words that bear accepted meanings and provide an appearance of continuity -but the analysis of which often reveals variation and contestation. Those terms can therefore be analysed not only as concepts, but also as spaces that allow different interests to manifest themselves, and that can be invested in or disinvested from by different social actors for various reasons. One could thus ask: who invests in those terms, and to what ends? With what consequences? And what alternative approaches to contemporary minority language issues are available that may allow us to analyse the same processes from a different, possibly broader, perspective? 2

The genealogy of this joint terminology is of considerable interest: while they have now permeated not only the media but also language activist groups in the Americas as well as in Europe, the terms language endangerment and language revitalisation arose in North American linguistics and linguistic anthropology. As such, they perpetuate North American anthropology's long-lasting programme of 'salvage anthropology' -preserving indigenous languages and culture while it is still possible, for future generations to find out about, or even to revive, as part of a long-lasting battle against ethnocentrism (see [START_REF] Lewis | The passion of Franz Boas[END_REF].

However, language 'endangerment' and 'revitalisation' are now leading lives of their own; several research programmes, responding to a wide array of interests and agendas, are being conducted in their names worldwide. This article argues that while endangerment and revitalisation have separate genealogies, they are now part of the same package, and serve to describe and analyse a wide array of processes worldwide. They bring social issues under the same framework that may otherwise have been analysed in terms of land claims, for example -as could often be the case in Latin America (e.g., Pivot to appear, on the Rama area in Nicaragua). Framing sociocultural issues in linguistic terms has a double effect: while it allows otherwise socially condemned voices [START_REF] Lafont | Un problème de culpabilité sociologique : la diglossie franco-occitane[END_REF] to be heard on a national and international scale, it also masks many other social issues at play; it also often serves to reproduce structures of inequality both between and within social and cultural groups (see [START_REF] Speed | Dangerous discourses: Human rights and multiculturalism in neoliberal Mexico[END_REF] on the effects of the promotion of cultural rights in Mexico).

I therefore suggest that language 'endangerment' and 'revitalisation' can be understood as part of 'regimes of truth' [START_REF] Foucault | Truth and Power[END_REF], i.e., 'types of discourses a society accepts and makes function as true' (Weir 2008, 368). Promoting socio-economic rights through language may therefore serve to naturalise constructed links between language, culture and ethnicity that lock peoples into an imagined past and potentially deprive them of a future. Framing socio-economic discourses through language may also induce language-related solutions, which in turn can easily overlook other types of solutions to otherwise formulated problems.

However, the endangerment/revitalisation approach to linguistic minority groups is, arguably, but one way of framing issues in which language plays a significant role. In the course of becoming dominant, this approach was imposed at the expense of others. Other approaches, such as those developed by Robert Lafont in southern France for example, permitted, on the one hand, social dimensions other than language to gain more consideration, and, on the other, allowed language to be seen as but one parameter in otherwise complex social problems that involved reshaping issues of power and domination.

In order to explore the questions outlined above, I will look at the development of 'revitalisation' as a keyword in North American anthropology and linguistics to show how, as a result of the portrayal of diversity as inherently desirable, language has gradually become a primary focus, rather than the focus being on social processes or people. This will allow me to characterise the endangerment/revitalisation regime of truth as a way to implement new sets of attitudes towards language rather than towards other types of socio-economic issues. I will then trace the adoption of the 'revitalisation' paradigm in France, showing how it is gradually masking former ways of looking at processes of minorisation, developed in particular in Occitan sociolinguistics, an approach I became acquainted with during my Ph.D. work in Provence [START_REF] Costa | Revitalisation linguistique: Discours, mythes et idéologies. Approche critique de mouvements de revitalisation en Provence et en Ecosse[END_REF]. Finally, I will outline possible alternative ways of looking at minority language contexts that concentrate not on language but rather on social processes. In other words, I wish to suggest that one way of taking action with regard to 'language endangerment' might well be, at least in a number of cases, to look at the processes involved from an altogether different perspective.

'Before it is too late'

Vitalistic metaphors have long been used in dialectology or anthropology [START_REF] Cameron | Language endangerment and verbal hygiene: History, morality and politics[END_REF], and the idea that languages can live or die was common throughout the twentieth century.

The idea that languages can be endangered is more occasional, and concerns for linguistic renaissances were, until the 1980s, left to activist movements.

In this section, I sketch the origins and development of the discourse of endangerment and revitalisation. A long-standing tradition of research in American linguistics does refer to language obsolescence (e.g., [START_REF] Swadesh | Sociologic notes on obsolescent languages[END_REF] or language death (e.g., [START_REF] Dorian | Language death!: The life cycle of a Scottish Gaelic dialect[END_REF]). Yet it was the American anthropologist Anthony Wallace who first used the term 'revitalisation' [START_REF] Wallace | Revitalization movements[END_REF][START_REF] Wallace | Foreword[END_REF]; see also [START_REF] Costa | Revitalisation linguistique: Discours, mythes et idéologies. Approche critique de mouvements de revitalisation en Provence et en Ecosse[END_REF] for a commentary) to describe a type of conscious, organised culture change.

Wallace originally employed the term to discuss a new religious cult, led by a local prophet, Handsome Lake, which developed among the Seneca Iroquois in the nineteenth century. The aim of the revitalisation movement was to provide a solution to the recurrent outbreak of conflict that was plaguing the community as a result of contact with European colonists.

An explicit concern for 'language revitalisation' later re-emerged at the crossroads between several events at the beginning of the 1990s (see [START_REF] Grinevald | Langues en danger : le phénomène et la réponse des linguistes[END_REF]. At that moment, two types of discourses were to join forces: the celebratory discourse on the 500 th anniversary of the discovery of the Americas by Columbus on the one hand, which was met with much anger among Native American groups. On the other hand, the prolonged work of linguists with Amerindian communities, particularly in Central America, led to the idea, expressed by the communities themselves, that something had to be done to help preserve languages that were vanishing fast. This conjunction of events led to the organisation of a symposium on language endangerment at the Linguistic Society of America's 1991 meeting (the proceedings were subsequently published as [START_REF] Hale | Endangered languages[END_REF]; see also [START_REF] Robins | Endangered languages[END_REF]).

In the above collection of papers, Craig (re-)introduced the term 'revitalisation' in her contribution on Nicaragua [START_REF] Craig | A constitutional response to language endangerment: the case of Nicaragua[END_REF], to translate the Spanish rescatar -a term used by the Sandinista government to describe the mission that had been assigned to her as a linguist working with the Rama people and language (Grinevald [Craig], personal communication, 2011). Since then, it has been used in a wide number of contexts by a significant number of linguists, sociolinguists and anthropologists.

The concern for the preservation of language diversity does however stem from an older tradition, namely the long-standing agenda in North American anthropology of documenting and salvaging indigenous languages -that is, writing them down and recording them for eternity, while this is still possible. This tradition is rooted in the works of Boas and, later, of Sapir and Whorf (see Woodbury 2011). Indeed, Whorf is himself credited by [START_REF] Fishman | Whorfianism of the third kind: Ethnolinguistic diversity as a worldwide societal asset (The Whorfian hypothesis: Varieties of vValidation, confirmation, and disconfirmation II)[END_REF] with having given rise to works on language preservation. Fishman considers that a third Whorfian hypothesis (after linguistic relativity and determinism) is one that champions linguistic diversity for the benefit of all mankind. This documentation agenda was initially motivated by the disappearance of the frontier in western America. In early twentieth century anthropology, as now in several sectors of linguistics, similar dynamics were at play: they rested upon the Boasian premise that what is uniquely human is diversity and variability (Bauman & Briggs 2003, Chapter 8).

In the words of the American anthropologist Jacob Gruber (1970,1297):

[…] the needs of salvage then [in the early 20 th century], so readily recognised through an awareness of a savage vanishing on the disappearing frontier of an advancing civilisation, set the tone and the method for much that was anthropology in the earlier years of its prosecution as a self-conscious discipline.

Though the American frontier may now be gone, other types of frontiers still exist in America as well as in other parts of the world -psychological frontiers between social categories for example. They are sometimes seen as rapidly disappearing as neoliberal capitalism makes its way across the planet, reshaping the diversity of both thought and social organisation locally as well as globally, and leading to the spectre of the advent of a form of global homogenisation (see [START_REF] Cameron | Language endangerment and verbal hygiene: History, morality and politics[END_REF]. This is often presented as a dire moment in some circles, where the disappearance of linguistic diversity is connected to human rights issues as well as to the loss of biodiversity (e.g., Skutnabb-Kangas 2009).

Tracing the complete genealogy of 'endangerment' and 'revitalisation' would require more space than allowed here. Yet a selection of quotations will show that similar dynamics, relating to industrialisation and the advance of modernity, manifest themselves in both early twentieth century anthropology and in contemporary works on language revitalisation. On the one hand, in The Study of Man, Haddon (1898, xxiii) thus remarked:

Now is the time to record. An infinitude has been irrevocably lost, a very great deal is now rapidly disappearing; thanks to colonisation, trade, and missionary enterprise, the change that has come over the uttermost parts of the world during the last fifty years is almost incredible.

On the other hand, more recently and in less celebratory language, Hinton (2003, 44) wrote:

'The processes of empire, industrialisation, and globalisation have made casualties out of indigenous languages and cultures' (see also Bell, this volume). It follows that, in a context of modernisation and decolonisation, uniqueness axiomatically requires saving for the greater benefit of all humankind [START_REF] Fishman | Whorfianism of the third kind: Ethnolinguistic diversity as a worldwide societal asset (The Whorfian hypothesis: Varieties of vValidation, confirmation, and disconfirmation II)[END_REF]; and, for a critical perspective, Cameron 2007), hence the need to rekindle diversity.

The logic behind documenting (then) and revitalising (now) is thus rooted in the same type of outlook on social reality: 'something' can -and should -be done (by whom is not always clear): whether it be by documenting, archiving, saving (for the future) or by revitalising (for the time being). This introduces a dichotomy between good (diversity, preservation, revitalisation, efforts to save languages or cultures) and bad (modernity, uniformity, homogenisation, and in fine, language shift). That is, some people (usually, in the endangerment/revitalisation discourse, 'Indigenous people') are assigned the role of being the custodians of linguistic diversity, not (only) for their own good, but also for the benefit of all humankind.

Additionally, in both early twentieth century anthropology and in early twenty-first century linguistics, languages and cultures were seen predominantly as monolithic artefacts that required saving as such, and not as evolving social practices treated as the products of human interaction. One of the dangers of essentialising the connection between language, people and identity is of course the construction of certain types of rights dependent on the practice of an indigenous or local language. In Mexico for instance, [START_REF] Muehlmann | Spread your ass cheeks": And other things that should not be said in indigenous languages[END_REF] remarks that state benefit to the Cucapá, an indigenous group in the Colorado delta region, is made available on the condition that the population can justify the practice of an indigenous language. Similarly, as Simpson (this volume) observes for Australia, 'knowledge of the songs and ceremonies associated with an area of land was sometimes critical in State recognition of traditional ownership'.

In associating certain groups with linguistic diversity, preservationist discourses naturalise an unexamined link between people and language. Putting abstract notions forward (for example 'our rich human diversity', 'humankind') and turning particularistic issues into universal ones, those discourses tend to objectify 'languages' and tend to concentrate on saving 'languages' rather than on the socio-economic issues faced by people (see [START_REF] Cameron | Language endangerment and verbal hygiene: History, morality and politics[END_REF][START_REF] Hill | Expert Rhetorics" in advocacy for endangered languages: Who is listening, and what do they hear?[END_REF] for a linguistic anthropological perspective on treasuring languages; Labov 2008 for a sociolinguistic perspective; see also [START_REF] Dobrin | Dying to be counted: the commodification of endangered languages in language documentation[END_REF] on commodification of languages in the documentation rhetoric).

While discourses on language endangerment and revitalisation are often tied to discourses of social justice, the premises upon which they rest are frequently rooted in principles that tend to naturalise connections between language and identity, and to divert attention from other types of socio-economic issues in favour of linguistic ones. For example, is revitalising a language an adequate response to -or way to address -threats to land, property or to environmental concerns, in turn caused by the very structure of the countries that concomitantly promote linguistic diversity? (See also [START_REF] Hale | Neoliberal multiculturalism: The remaking of cultural rights and racial dominance in Central America[END_REF][START_REF] Speed | Dangerous discourses: Human rights and multiculturalism in neoliberal Mexico[END_REF][START_REF] Good | Community' collaboration in Africa: Experiences from Northwest Cameroon[END_REF] Erasing people and conflict in language revitalisation studies Language revitalisation is strikingly, for the most part, presented as being about language, not about people (but contrast Bell, this volume, for example). This section will characterise the regimes of truth generated by the revitalisation discourse in terms of erasing 'people' on the one hand, in favour of 'language', and of levelling internal conflict, on the other. Here is shown how the question of language revitalisation is often (albeit mostly unconsciously) reduced to a matter of 'attitudes', understood in its simplest definition as 'a disposition to react favourably or unfavourably to a class of objects' (Sarnoff 1970, 279). In cases where individuals tend to react unfavourably to a language deemed (often by others) as their own, language revitalisation becomes a matter of getting people to react favourably to something thought to be to their benefit.

A first example is taken from [START_REF] Meyer | Indigenous language revitalization in Tecate, Baja California: A narrative account[END_REF], an account of a language revitalisation programme in Baja California, in Mexico. Interestingly, the authors frame the loss of linguistic identity in terms of erasure during the process of the construction of the Mexican nation-state: 'Thus in Mexico, as in other countries, indigenous people are just "Mexicans". Their indigenous identity is erased.' (Meyer and Cuero 2011, 58).

In addition to the alienation described above, the authors depict a situation of poverty and dire socio-economic conditions. But the point they make is not that language is not itself a priority in such conditions, but rather that those economic conditions obscure the intrinsic value of the indigenous language and of the revitalisation programme:

Many language programs have sprung up and fizzled. In general, it came down to the situation that people did not want to teach the language unless they were paid for it. […] Unless people were more secure within themselves, and hence probably had a higher socio-economic level and, with that, a better education, they could not see the point of revitalisation for itself. (Meyer and Cuero 2011, 59) The assumption of the authors is that the value of the language does not naturally depend on the state of the market in which it is exchanged (i.e., on its social or economic value), but rather rests within the language itself. Revitalisation is not questioned as such -what is questioned are the attitudes displayed by speakers. Yet, of the speakers themselves we learn very little from the article -other than that they are poor. What the authors choose to put forward is the language, and the revitalisation programme that serves it; individuals exist as 'speakers' of language X or Y (I intentionally use [START_REF] Fishman | Reversing language shift: Theoretical and empirical foundations of assistance to threatened languages[END_REF] terminology here to show that the tendency to objectify language and to essentialise the link between communities and language is not restricted to linguistics or linguistic anthropology; see Muehlmann 2011 for an example of how individuals can resent being seen primarily as speakers rather than as, say, fishers, craftspeople, etc.).

A second example is taken from [START_REF] Kroskrity | Language renewal as sites of language ideological struggle. The need for "ideological clarification[END_REF], who justifies the existence of language revitalisation among the Western Mono of North Fork and Auberry in Central California and among the Arizona Tewa. Because of internal conflict among individuals, Kroskrity characterises both groups as requiring 'prior ideological clarification' (a term introduced by Fishman 1991) so as to achieve a desirable common goal, i.e., the revitalisation of their languages. Clarification is seen as a means to erase unnecessary conflict among those groups, thus linking language reclamation and indigenousness (the language is a desirable part of what it means to be indigenous), and at the same time homogenising those groups (for all indigenous people, language revitalisation is intrinsically desirable). Therefore, while aiming to analyse internal conflict among the Tewa, Kroskrity (2009, 80) writes:

[…] by treating ideological clarification, not as an afterthought, but rather as a precondition and an ongoing process for successful language renewal, communities can avoid, or at least minimize, the kinds of conflicts and breakdowns in cooperation that can prove disastrous for such projects.

Apparently the project aimed to minimise conflict and to help promote revitalisation (or 'renewal'), though the term and its implications are not explored. This illustrates how in a 'language revitalisation' approach, linguists or anthropologists tend to downplay the fact that processes of language change are outcomes of prolonged contact between groups (in this case of a colonial nature), inevitably tied to a diversity of stances and positions among community members, and may be viewed by some community members as acceptable or desirable (again, see Bell, this volume, for an alternative view). Instead, the revitalisation approach favours the elaboration of a consensual and homogeneous view of communities where the desirability of 'reviving' a language is neither questioned nor questionable. Issues and debates become attitudinal problems that may be addressed in order to achieve necessary consensus.

Consequently, this approach, centred on homogenised groups, allows the erasure of other types of social divisions, such as social class.

Both attitudes outlined above in the two examples are embraced by Hinton (2003, 47), according to whom 'in the 1970s and 1980s, many communities did not fully recognize the extreme danger facing their languages'. In viewing 'communities' as dwelling outside organised realms of effective power, occupied by the coloniser and the outsider, not only does Hinton downplay social processes of domination and asymmetrical contact in favour of an analysis in terms of larger, de-personified, historical processes such as globalisation, she also misses the tensions and disputes that inevitably coexist within those groups. Further, she fails to address the very fabric of power and domination and the participation of members of dominated groups in their own domination (see Foucault 1980, 118-119]). It is therefore not a matter of 'not fully recognising' danger, but of symbolically investing various domains (or not) as symbols of resistance. Yet, despite Hinton's implication, language is not inherently a symbol of resistance through a display of identity: it is only so in particular contexts. The 'endangerment'/'revitalisation' discourse emerged in a historically situated and socially constructed setting.

Importing language revitalisation into French sociolinguistics

The 'endangerment' and 'revitalisation' discourse is by no means restricted to North America; in fact, it has become dominant worldwide due to the subscription to it of such institutional bodies as UNESCO (e.g. Moseley 2010). To understand how it is being imposed or adopted, and how previous, local traditions of research are being displaced by the new paradigm, we will draw on the example of France. It is worth mentioning however that a similar enterprise could be conducted about North American scholarship, where more critical perspectives also existed before the 1990s -see [START_REF] Hill | Mixed grammar, purist grammar, and language attitudes in Modern Nahuatl[END_REF] for example -and have continued until now [START_REF] Hill | Expert Rhetorics" in advocacy for endangered languages: Who is listening, and what do they hear?[END_REF].

The emergence of the new discourse was reported very early in the French social sciences, through the publication of a special issue of the journal Diogène (1991, n° 153) that presented the translations of four articles from [START_REF] Robins | Endangered languages[END_REF]. However, those articles dealt with faraway linguistic contexts, and in 1992 the renowned French linguist Georges Mounin published a 'Discussion on the Death of Language' [START_REF] Mounin | Discussion -sur la mort des langues[END_REF] 2006) that echoed the publication of Diogène. There he deemed the new field of research mostly absent in French linguistics:

This unused collection of documents [i.e., the articles published in Diogène] may surprise more than one specialist of European or French linguistics, for whom issues related to Alsacian, Breton, Occitan, Basque, Valdôtain, or even Flemish often rest at the margins of current preoccupations and research; and, unless I am mistaken, they seldom appear in our journals. [START_REF] Mounin | Discussion -sur la mort des langues[END_REF] 2006, 182, my translation)

Other reasons for the potential lack of interest in the new field of language endangerment included, according to Mounin, the absence of a fixed terminology, and the interdisciplinary nature of the new domain.

It was therefore not until 1999 that the endangerment discourse made its way into French linguistics, when the Société de Linguistique de Paris organised a conference entitled 'Les langues en danger'. Participants included specialists of minority languages of France, such as Occitan, as well as linguists working in Oceania and Latin America; the proceedings were published in 2000.

The year 2000 also saw the coming together of several types of linguistic discourses in France: those on 'endangered languages', but also discourses surrounding issues of minority rights brought about by the signing and ratifying of the Council of Europe European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In turn, those discourses met existing ones about the threat that English allegedly posed to French at an international level.

The ideological climate was therefore ripe for the linguist Claude Hagège to publish that very same year his book entitled Halte à la mort des langues [Stop the death of languages] [START_REF] Hagège | Halte à la mort des langues[END_REF], aimed at a wide audience and later translated in English as On the Death and Life of Languages [START_REF] Hagège | On the death andlife of languages[END_REF]). 3 The rhetoric developed by Hagège was new to the general public in France, especially coming from such a prominent authority, and immediately attracted attention on the part of minority language activists. Hagège combined new arguments taken directly from the endangered languages paradigm, in particular figures and rates of endangerment (such as the famous 50-90% rate of language disappearance before the end of the century, and the claim that one language disappears every fortnight), with older elements of discourse linked with the defence of the French language.

Drawing heavily on the endangerment and revitalisation discourse, Hagège's book is rife with vitalist metaphors. For example, languages are described as 'purveyors of life' (the title of Chapter 1) that need to be resurrected. The final chapter deals with 'resuscitating' languages and presents cases such as those of Hebrew in Israel, Cornish in the UK, and Rama in Nicaragua.

Most importantly, and as in the discourses outlined in the previous section, social actors are erased in favour of languages, and both internal and external social conflicts are masked; instead the reader is presented with an abstract conflict opposing 'languages' as entities rather than people caught in issues of power, domination and minorisation. Hagège achieves this through formulating the problem of language endangerment using general, impersonal sentences where agents are not identified (e.g., 'I recalled, however, that new languages were born, or were resuscitated during the 19 th and 20 th centuries […] One can resuscitate a language' [Hagège 2000, 363, my translation]).

The endangerment/revitalisation terminology has since then been largely adopted by language advocates in Brittany, southern France and other parts of the country, and is often connected with a rhetoric that links language endangerment with biodiversity endangerment.

Yet, the vocabulary and rhetorical devices used by Hagège contrast strongly with the writings of sociolinguists such as Robert Lafont, Jean-Baptiste Marcellesi and others in the 1970s and 1980s, whose focus was, as the next section illustrates, on speakers and social processes of domination and alienation.

'Rolling up diglossia,' or looking at minority languages from a different perspective

Occitan sociolinguistic discourse, like the endangerment/revitalisation approach, had as its object the contexts of minority languages. As such, it provides one alternative model worth examining. In contrast with the works outlined in previous sections, this approach does not seek to influence the attitudes of speakers towards their language; rather, it seeks to attend to the very ideological fabric of the social environment of individuals, part of which is embedded in linguistic form, language use, and discourse on form and use.

Robert Lafont was a prominent Occitan 4 linguist and sociolinguist who taught at the University of Montpellier for several decades and considerably influenced Occitan sociolinguistics in the 1970s and 1980s through his prolific body of work in linguistics, sociolinguistics, sociology, economics and literature (see, in particular, the collection of sociolinguistics articles in [START_REF] Lafont | Quarante ans de sociolinguistique à la périphérie[END_REF].

Before I present more details about Occitan sociolinguistics, I wish to elaborate upon the Provençal context in which I conducted fieldwork between 2007 and 2011, as it will explain why I sought to distance my work on minority language sociolinguistics away from 'language' issues to concentrate more on 'speakers' issues. I initially moved away from the discourse of endangered languages precisely because of a situation similar to that outlined by [START_REF] Kroskrity | Language renewal as sites of language ideological struggle. The need for "ideological clarification[END_REF], parts of which are analysed below.

During my time in the field, I identified (at least) two sets of radically different positions towards the local language, in terms of language naming, linguistic boundary setting and preferred orthography (see Costa and Gasquet-Cyrus, to appear). To simplify the matter, one may say that a 'Provençalist' discourse claims that Provençal is a language in its own right, spoken in historical Provence and codified in the nineteenth century by Frederic Mistral. Conversely, an 'Occitanist' discourse claims that Provençal is in fact a dialect of a larger language, Occitan, spoken in most of the south of France (the 'Midi'), and can be written with an orthography based on the one in use in medieval times that allows written intercomprehension throughout the linguistic territory.

While this conflict leads to the current impossibility of implementing an institutional language policy in the area, I have argued elsewhere that the situation is best understood as a set of ideological debates that are as much part of the very fabric of the region as the language itself [START_REF] Costa | Du local au global : essai de clarification idéologique préalable. Discours concurrents et revitalisation linguistique en Provence[END_REF]. Both sets of discourse seek to generate and impose new regimes of truth, and attempts at ideological clarification would inevitably be welcomed with hostility and would certainly end in the betrayal of some form of adherence of the expert to one side or the other.

A scientific examination of situations of language revitalisation cannot thus be premised upon the idea that such processes are inherently desirable, that languages should necessarily be saved. It is indeed the very nature of regimes of truth not to be true per se, but to represent points of view on how to construct events into situations, situations into problems, and problems into solutions. Since in the Provençal case no stance regarding language could be taken as either 'true' or 'false', the bitter debates that took place locally needed to be explored in other ways than through this overwhelming dichotomy.

A new direction came from reading the works of the Occitan historian Philippe Martel, whose work is related to Occitan sociolinguistics. According to Martel, 'the bottom line of the linguistic problem in France is not ethnic: no "Francian" people ever came to impose its language to other subdued people. It is however undeniably connected to issues of social class' (Martel 2001, 383, my translation). As mentioned above, issues of social class, especially within language minority groups, are typically among the ones that the endangered languages paradigm rarely addresses. This provided the impetus for looking at the Provençal situation through new lenses, and allowed me to suggest that the ongoing conflict in Provence corresponded to different manifestations of geographic or social class conflicts over a period of more than 150 years. In its later form, this conflict allowed social actors to actualise and give substance to otherwise disembodied processes such as globalisation. Depicting one group, the 'Occitanists', as middle-class agents of globalisation allows the other group, the 'Provençalists', to (re)present themselves as rural defenders of true Provençalité in the superordinate context of increased globalisation, and to give that process substance, shape and an identifiable figure. Central to the works of Occitan sociolinguistics was the notion of conflict, expressed though the redefinition of the notion of diglossia, seen not as a stable situation but rather as representing conflicting interests at play between dominant and dominated groups, which would inevitably result in either assimilation to the dominant group or normalisation. The latter term was to be understood as the (re-)establishment of all functions normally assigned to a standardised language.

Occitan sociolinguistics, however, did not focus on saving a language, seen as a constantly evolving social practice, but on liberating otherwise socially condemned voices [START_REF] Lafont | Un problème de culpabilité sociologique : la diglossie franco-occitane[END_REF]. This was to be achieved through 'rolling up diglossia', i.e., raising the social position of those who spoke Occitan or French with an Occitan accent through the renegotiation of the respective roles of both languages on a common linguistic market (see also [START_REF] Bourdieu | The economics of linguistic exchanges[END_REF].

In addition to the points outlined above, Occitan sociolinguistics can contribute to general sociolinguistics in the following ways: sociolinguists (and also, importantly, activists) ought to consider social processes rather than just language, and should avoid falling into the trap of identity, which in turn ethnicises what are fundamentally social issues of alienation, domination, and resistance. Occitan is not the preserve of a unique people with a distinctive identity; instead it is a way of expressing sets of (currently) marginalised voices. According to Lafont, nationalism was a consequence of an identity approach, which was another trap to be avoided as it locked a homogenised people in a single way of looking at history, and potentially denied them a future. Accordingly, sociolinguistics should deal with social conditions ultimately affecting (or not) patterns of language use, rather than language. Yet, while this type of discourse elaborated in the 1970s and 1980s has not totally disappeared from the French academic sociolinguistic scene, it is now far less audible either in the media or among language activists, partly because it lacks a central feature of the endangerment/revitalisation discourse, namely the sense of urgency and possible moral panic that the latter provides.

Conclusion and discussion: Language, ideologies and language revitalisation

The ideas examined above contribute to a discussion on the connections that can be made between the development of the endangerment/revitalisation discourse and the rise of other, seemingly unrelated, neoliberal economic discourses. This paper has regarded the emergence of the language endangerment/revitalisation discourse as leading to the construction of a regime of truth that provided a grid to generate solutions to a perceived state of stress or crisis. This discourse has tended to erase local, social specificities in favour of an essentialising discourse that focuses on languages rather than on people, and in turn homogenises communities around issues of language and collective identity. This process potentially obscures other pressing issues, of social class for example.

It was then suggested that alternative ways of looking at language issues among minority groups were developed in several places, and are still available. Those approaches permit an analysis in terms of social actors and processes, and do not necessarily posit that attitudinal change is necessary to attain a greater good defined from the outside. Instead, they provide social actors with an analysis of ideological positions that run through a particular group. The approach outlined, based on the work of Lafont, aims at liberating otherwise socially condemned voices, by making them heard and by changing their position on what I termed, after Bourdieu, a common (unified) linguistic market. Shifting terminology, and reframing issues with other metaphors, thus allow for different approaches to be developed, and for contrastive solutions and policies to be devised.

In fact, as regimes of truth, discourses on endangerment and revitalisation are but one way of looking at a series of social issues in a range of very dissimilar contexts that tend to be regrouped under a reduced number of keywords. Such discourses are accordingly convenient in many respects. They allow minority groups to gain access to the media, and they allow governments to integrate minority languages into their national narratives. Yet ultimately, what is focused upon is possibly more 'our rich cultural heritage', an often vacuous notion that draws on a global discourse of immaterial (intangible) heritage, and downplays the social processes that lead to situations of minorisation in the first place (see also [START_REF] Cameron | Language endangerment and verbal hygiene: History, morality and politics[END_REF].

To understand what is really at play in a community, 'languages' may therefore not be the best place to start when looking at processes that apparently involve the recuperation of former linguistic practices. Discourse on language(s), however, who utters it, to what ends, and importantly, who doesn't use it, may be an excellent place to start (see Simpson, this volume). Debates on linguistic issues are typically one way of gaining access to many other elements at stake [START_REF] Blommaert | The debate is open[END_REF] as the language entry may provide a window onto the ideological functioning of a group.

Finally, the endangerment/revitalisation approach may perhaps prove beneficial in some contexts, particularly in such contexts where regional languages are no longer central to the social and political life of the areas where they are/were spoken. That is, where they are less likely to do any immediate harm. Yet I suggest that looking at minority language settings from different points of view -ones that address issues of social actors, of power circulation, and of social class, ones that concentrate on the local without immediately assigning it to a global category such as 'language endangerment' -might also be a form of response that anthropologists and linguists can propose to the people with whom they work. This last section intends to go beyond this. The elements of reflection on language endangerment I have presented do not exist within an ideological vacuum. They are, I argue, deeply connected to the rise of neoliberal economic discourses. As I outlined above, the endangerment/revitalisation discourse is itself rooted in the North American anthropological discourse of salvation. This discourse was, however, able to flourish again in North America, and subsequently across the world, for a number of reasons, discussion of which is beyond the scope of this article. Indeed, while the commemorations of the 500 th anniversary of the so-called discovery of the Americas by Columbus sparked new claims and demands at the end of the 1980s, this discourse received a warm welcome in several parts of the continent from new economic (neoliberal) discourses that were gaining ground at the same time and that looked favourably upon the development of new multicultural policies. According to [START_REF] Speed | Dangerous discourses: Human rights and multiculturalism in neoliberal Mexico[END_REF], in the case of Mexico, while Indians are busy defining and debating which ethnic groups they belong to and what language they (ought to) speak, they are not busy voicing other types of social demands. Interestingly, Speed also remarks that in Mexico multicultural and linguistic rights were granted to indigenous communities at the same time as other types of rights, such as rights to communal land, were scrapped. I therefore suggest that a connection may be established between the flourishing of discourses that tend to essentialise links between language and communities, and to homogenise groups, and others that promote cultural rights as a way to erase other social or territorial rights.

In France as well, one could remark that the endangerment and revitalisation discourse started to gain momentum precisely at the moment when the general political discourse was gradually affected by a tendency to ethnicise different types of social problems [START_REF] Amselle | L'ethnicisation de la France[END_REF], in particular in connection with the suburbs of large cities -debates in which linguistic issues played an important part. Further research is urgently needed to understand how discourses of endangerment and neoliberal discourses may in fact be serving or fuelling each other, despite apparently serving contradictory objectives.

I

  now return to Occitan sociolinguistics. Martel had been a student of Lafont in the 1970s, at a time when French sociolinguistics developed around several poles in Paris, Rouen, and Montpellier. The last two centres were particularly instrumental in developing a sociolinguistics of minority groups, particularly in Corsica (Rouen, around Marcellesi) and in the Occitan-speaking regions (Montpellier, around Lafont). The Montpellier school itself developed in close collaboration with the Catalan school of sociolinguistics based in Barcelona (together, they are also known as 'native sociolinguistics', or 'peripheral sociolinguistics').

Notes

1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Society in Montreal, November 2011, in a panel on potential bridges between Anglophone and Francophone sociolinguistics. I am grateful to the organisers of the panel, Alexandre Duchêne and Alexandra Jaffe, for letting me develop my ideas in that context. I would also like to thank Julia Sallabank and an anonymous reviewer for their extremely helpful and insightful comments on an earlier draft of this article. Finally, I thanks to Sara Brennan for her remarks on the structure and content of this paper. All remaining faults and flaws are my responsibility alone.

2 In this respect, this article is situated within a tradition that seeks to reflect upon the conditions of the development of a stronger link between sociolinguistics and social theory (see, for example [START_REF] Cameron | Demythologizing sociolinguistics[END_REF][START_REF] Cameron | Introduction[END_REF][START_REF] Carter | Language, structure and agency: What can realist social theory offer to sociolinguistics[END_REF][START_REF] Williams | Sociolinguistics: A sociological critique[END_REF]).

3 Claude Hagège often appears in popular media, and is therefore fairly well-known among the general public. 4 Occitan is a Romance language spoken in various dialects throughout the south of France. It has given rise to the development of an Occitan identity through the course of the twentieth century, and the Occitan movement remains one of the most dynamic language movements in France.