One solution to the language control problem is to control that which can be controlled, i.e., the written language, and this is of course what many polities, including France, have fallen back on. The French sociologist Bourdieu has written extensively about how language, especially language in France, has come to occupy a place where not only is language controlled, language controls. His view of language and culture is that they constitute a system of exchanges, operating in a sort of linguistic market, and by constituting a unified market-place where only one kind of language is permissible, no French citizen can escape the system.
Bourdieu's point of view, as far as official language in France is concerned, converges, in certain ways, with mine, so my thesis, that linguistic dirigisme is related to economic dirigisme is not so far-fetched. Bourdieu is at great pains to point out that though centralism is indeed a characteristic of the habitus of the country, it is not through decrees and ordinances that the state controls language.
The official language is linked with the State. And that is true both in its genesis and in its social usage. It is in the process of state constitution that the conditions that constitute the unified linguistic marketplace are created and dominated by the official language: obligatory at official occasions and in official spaces (the school, public administration, political institutions, etc.), this State Language becomes the theoretical norm against which all linguistic practices are measured objectively. No-one is able to ignore the linguistic law, which has its body of judges, the grammarians, and its agents of imposition and control, the teachers, who are invested with the power to make their speaking subjects submit their linguistic performance without exception to examinations and juridical sanctions of the scholastic kind.
La langue officielle a partie liée avec l'État. Et cela tant dans sa genèse que dans ses usages sociaux. C'est dans le processus de constitution de l'état que se créent les conditions de la constitution d'un marché linguistique unifié et dominé par la langue officielle: obligatoire dans les occasions officielles et dans les espaces officiels (école, administrations publique, institutions politiques, etc.), cette langue d'État devient la norme théorique à laquelle toutes les pratiques linguistiques sont objectivement mesurées. Nul n'est censé ignorer la loi linguistique qui a son corps de juristes, les grammairiens, et ses agents d'imposition et de contrôle, les maitres de l'enseignement, investis du pouvoir de soumettre universellement à l'examen et à la sanction juridique du titre scolaire la performance linguistique des sujets parlants. (Bourdieu 1982:27)
But, he goes on to note,
``For one mode of expression among others ...to impose itself as the only legitimate one, the linguistic market must be unified and different dialects (class, regional, or ethnic) must be measured against the standards of the language or by legitimate usage. Integration into one single linguistic community' ...is the [necessary] condition for the establishment of the state of linguistic domination." (Bourdieu op.cit. p. 28. )
``Until the French Revolution, the process of linguistic unification was indistinguishable from the process of the construction of the monarchical state." ...``The dialects ...[especially in the north of France, or pays de langue d'oil ] begin to give way, progressively, from the 14th century onwards, ...to the common language which was being elaborated in Paris in cultivated domains, and promoted by a statute of official language ...i.e.) utilized in the form that educated use had given it, i.e. the written form." (op.cit. p. 29.)
During the revolution, he points out, the dialects were unusable as the langue pratique' for decrees etc. because the available vocabulary didn't have common meanings; revolutionaries were thus forced to ``forge" a common language [langue moyenne] with particular attention given to spelling. Thus the fixation on meanings, of trying to control the official language so that it could be inculcated into the heads of the new citizens, making them think more clearly, etc. This concern with these fussy issues still goes on today, resulting in the the movements concerned with the ``défense de la langue," which he calls a kind of ``mind control." (Bourdieu ibid.)
``The imposition of the legitimate language against the idiomes and patois is part of the political strategies destined to assure the perpetuation of the gains of the Revolution by the production and reproduction of the new man [l'homme nouveau.]"
Language becomes a ``method" which allows people to identify the revolutionary language with revolutionary thought: to ``reform language, purge it of usages linked to the former society and [re]impose it thus purified, is to impose a thought process itself purged and purified." We must not think of political and linguistic unification simply as a technical process, of communication, or simply to see it as a kind of statist centralism intent on crushing local particularisms, however. ``The conflict between the French of the revolutionary intelligentsia, and the idiomes or patois is a struggle for symbolic power over the formation and re-formation of mental structures." (emphasis mine, hfs) (Bourdieu op cit.p.31.)
Thus,
``it is not just a question of communicating, but of recognizing a new discourse of authority, with its new political vocabulary, its terms of address and of reference, its metaphors, its euphemisms, and the representation of the social world which it authorizes, and which, because it is linked to the new interests of new groups, is inexpressible in the local speech forms fashioned by usages linked to specific interests of peasant groups." (Bourdieu op cit.p.31.)
``While one must not forget the contribution which political unification movements (which are visible in other domains, such as that of the law) bring to the fabrication of the language that linguists accept as a natural given, one must also not impute to it the entire responsibility for the generalised use of the dominant language, (a) dimension of the market unification of symbolic goods that accompanies the unification of the economy, and also cultural production and cultural circulation. It is easy to see in the case of the matrimonial exchange market" (Bourdieu op cit.p.35.)
What he is referring to here is the marriage market, where linguistic products' until then destined to circulate in the protected enclosure of local markets are perceived to be suddenly devalued and revalorized as ``peasant values", resulting in the collapse of the peasantry (especially its male component) who are then condemned to celibacy/bachelorhood; this is because women won't marry men who speak like peasants if they can marry men who speak the `legitimate' language.
Confirming Labov's observation (Labov 1972) that lower-middle class women are the quickest to adopt linguistic features of higher prestige, varying more widely between their informal and formal speech than any other class or gender, Bourdieu goes on to describe why French women are the first to adopt standard speech in rural areas:
``and since women are quicker to adopt the legitimate language (or the proper pronunciation) ...especially because they specialize in the domain of consumption (of various products, especially the language) and by the logic of marriage, which is for them the principal route to social mobility, where they move upward, they are predisposed to accept, beginning at school, the new demands of the symbolic capital market. (Bourdieu op cit.p.35.)
Here Bourdieu points out what is the real causative factor in promoting official language, namely, that the imposition of another language does not happen because the state decrees it, but because of other social factors correlated with the officialization. (emphasis mine, HS)
``Thus, the effects of domination which are correlated with the unification of the market are not exercised except by means of a whole complex of specific institutions and mechanisms, of which language policy proper, along with the intentional interventions of pressure groups, are only very superficial factors." (Bourdieu op cit.p.35.)
In other words, you don't have to have the ``overt" kinds of pressure associated with officialization, because they are only superficially effective; the market and other institutions allied with it do the job for you.
``And the fact that [juridical or quasi-juridical constraints] presuppose political and economic unification, which they contribute, retroactively, to the strengthening of does not at all imply that one should impute the progress of the official language to the direct efficacity of [these] constraints, (which can only impose the acquisition ([my emphasis, hs] of the official language but not the general use of it, and at the same time, the autonomous reproduction of it.) Every symbolic domination presupposes on the part of those who submit to it a form of complicity, which is neither passive submission to an exterior constraint, nor free acceptance of its values. The recognition of the legitimacy of the official language has nothing of a belief deliberately professed and therefore revocable, nor of an intentional act of acceptance of a ``norme"; it is rather inscribed in the practical state of dispositions which are subtly inculcated, as part of a long and slow process of acquisition, by the sanctions of the linguistic marketplace and which are often adjusted, without any cynical calculation or of any consciously resented constraint, to the chances of material and symbolic profit which the laws of the formation of prices chaaracteristic of a certain market objectively promise to the possessors of a certain linguistic capital."
This means, he adds in a footnote (op. cit, p. 37), that ``linguistic customs [moeurs] cannot be modified by decrees the way partisans of a volunteerist policy involving ``défense de la langue" seem to believe.