Why “Real men don't speak French”: Deconstructing cultural attitudes to a language by historicizing their discursive formations

Guided by Foucault's concept of “discursive formations,” the study reported here draws on primary archival and secondary source material to examine how French has been discursively shaped in England and in relation to English. Unpacking sociohistorical constructions of sameness–difference offers a productive frame to explore ideological positionings in new, interdisciplinary ways that have thus far been underdeveloped in applied linguistics. The study historicizes attitudes to French in England from the 16th century, a time characterized by the coupling of language and nation that has echoed down the ages voiced as received wisdom. While French remained the dominant European vernacular during the early modern period, French in England was increasingly framed as a threat against increasingly nationalist, patriarchal models of language, whereby mythologizing histories positioned French as florid and effete in opposition to plain, manly Saxon English. Not only were boys and girls encouraged to learn different versions of French (different content and different skills) but racialized philology also sought to expunge the etymologically French fabric from English. Learning foreign languages, even the adoption of loan terms, was fraught with the risk of pretentiously identifying too strongly with the other and of disidentifying with home and nation.