Chapter 7. The Battleground of Language and the Changing Discourse of Francophonie
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Battleground of Language and the Changing Discourse of Francophonie T he territories acquired during the various phases of France's imperial conquests are now largely lost to France, whether this happened in the past, as the consequence of inter-imperial rivalry, as in the case of its overseas territories in Canada and most of its footholds in India, or through the struggles of the colonised peoples themselves, as in the case of Saint-Domingue and much of the later empire.The military defeat of France in Indochina, following the battle of Dien Bien Phu, and its inability to achieve victory in the Algerian War marked two particularly bloody moments in the decolonisation process.Elsewhere in Africa, however, the final act of decolonisation was achieved relatively peacefully (Grimal 1978; Chafer 2002).Indeed, Fanon quotes the president of the newly independent Republic of Gabon, arriving for an official visit in Paris and proclaiming that 'Gabon is independent, but nothing has changed between Gabon and France, everything is the same as before ' (Fanon (1961' (Fanon ( )/1987: 47): 47).In the first flush of anticolonialism and national liberation, much was made by those who were not so happy with the colonial status quo of the cultural imperialism that was an integral part of colonial rule.The imposition of an alien culture, including one of its most important elements, an alien language, was rightly denounced as part of the system of oppression.Fanon, for instance, wrote of the way in which the acquisition of mastery over the language of the coloniser both stemmed from and reinforced the feeling of inferiority that the colonised came to feel towards their own language and culture, as well as their eventual annihilation (Fanon (1952(Fanon ( )/1975: 13-14: 13-14).In the case of Creole, the inferiority of the language was internalised and many families seeking social advancement insisted on their children speaking French, a phenomenon illustrated in Damas's poem 'Hoquet' (Damas 1937).However, the issues surrounding the question of language were more complex than its use as a simple tool of cultural oppression.In point of fact, the French colonial education system had not been designed as a simple, straightforward This open access library edition is supported by Knowledge Unlatched.Not for resale.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".