Constitutional Principles on Languages in France

The French Constitution includes various articles on languages. The regulation of French arises from making the primacy of this language and its exclusive character in the public arena subject to the Constitution. In parallel with the process of administrative decentralization, the constitutional recognition of regional languages enjoys a much more limited regulatory scope.

The recognition of these languages by French public law has taken a very problematic route, and the clash between the classic reading of the principles of equality, indivisibility and unity, on the one hand, and the principles flowing from language diversity (the existence of language communities and language rights) on the other, continues unresolved. The ratification process for the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages has underscored the difficulty of reconciling these two aspirations. Even today, the ratification process is unresolved, and recent efforts to revise the Constitution to revive the ratification of the Charter highlight, under peculiar, hitherto unheard of categories, how difficult it is to overcome the hierarchy between French and the regional languages, on the one hand, and, on the other, to build up a branch of French law dealing with harmonious, non-exclusive, language diversity.