« C'est un blasphème de parler le créole » Metaphors of language by French and Creole speakers from Reunion Island

Language attitudes are affected by changing language policy and the importance given to language in a local setting as well as in larger regions. In the French overseas territory Reunion Island an important event took place... [ view full abstract ]

Language attitudes are affected by changing language policy and the importance given to language in a local setting as well as in larger regions. In the French overseas territory Reunion Island an important event took place in the beginning of the 2000s when the diglossic situation changed as a result of the introduction of Creole as a language of school. This step lifted Creole’s official status, since the language until then had mainly been restricted to the home domain. However, it is not obvious that such changes in language policy immediately influence people’s attitudes, which are closely linked to their experiences with the languages in question and to their view of languages and language hierarchies. In this paper, we examine how speakers of French and Creole in the Reunion Island evaluate and describe the languages they use. The data come from conversations between one of the authors of this paper and twenty Reunionese adults in 2004, about the time for the changes in language policy at the Island.

In Cognitive Linguistics, cultural models are seen to shape and be shaped by people’s views on social reality (Geeraerts 2003), and an analysis of metaphorical expressions used in connection with a phenomenon (here French and Creole) is revealing of people’s underlying patterns of thoughts. In our analysis, we therefore pay special attention to metaphors, construed according to Conceptual Metaphor Theory (cf. Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999), and further developed and used within different kinds of discourse (Cameron 2003, Charteris-Black, 2004, Musollf 2004) to understand the participants’ conceptualizations, and as such their attitudes and values. The participants express a generalized resistance to the introduction of Creole in schools and in doing so they construct languages as belonging to different locations, having power and being more or less valuable. The ideal of pure languages is also omnipresent. Their conceptualizations of language in general and the difference between Creole and French in particular will be discussed in light of the colonial history of the Reunion Island.