A Century of Changing Language Beliefs in Alsace

Abstract

This article traces the development over the course of the last century of the language beliefs of the Alsace population. It focuses in particular on the language varieties that have featured most prominently throughout the history of their region, namely French, Alsatian, and German, as the status of each has fluctuated dramatically. Poised between historic national enemies, Alsace has been the scene, and resulting reward, of many violent clashes. As control of the region has changed hands between France and Germany four times since 1870, Adamson christened Alsace ‘the political football of Western Europe in the last 150 years’. This series of changes and resulting language contact make Alsace a fascinating language policy case study. After first examining the historical sociolinguistic context of the region, the article investigates the constantly shifting positions of the three aforementioned language varieties in the last 100 years. Now that Franco-German relations have been considerably strengthened, what does this mean for language policy in twenty-first-century Alsace?

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