“But my father considered a right to do us speak French”. Testimonies of the abandonment of Catalan in North Catalonia

Abstract

This article is an approach to the chronology and to the justification of the process of rupture in the intergenerational transmission of Catalan by the French language in North Catalonia through the living histories of a set of witnesses who have personally experienced it. The chronology sheds light on the onset of the process in Perpignan and its expansion to the rest of the territory. The subjects who give us their testimony here are insufficient to allow the antiquity of the phenomenon to be grasped, but they help us to visualise its development along the territorial axis. Regarding the justification of the process, the testimonies gathered here point mainly to the political foundations of the French school system.
Keywords: North Catalonia, language shift, family language rupture, French language and school, language policy.