GoLingua · Global Lingua Franca: A Transnational History of French, 1800–1870

GoLingua contrasts the French language’s relative decline across post-Napoleonic Europe against its prominence as a “Global Lingua Franca” among new elites who came increasingly in contact with European space from 1800 through 1870. By focusing on the outward spread of the language from Paris to the country’s modest empire, researchers have lost sight of the female speakers and isolated elites from many areas who adopted French to connect with a globalizing world. My research recovers the stories of non-native French speakers from many regions in order to propose a new transnational framework for the study of the history of language. Recent histories of global French begin their accounts in the final third of the nineteenth century, when the French colonial empire expanded beyond Algeria. I challenge this consensus by showing how speakers outside French space learned the language in a much earlier period. Shared communications in French created a long-lasting form of social cohesion that stretched across national and imperial borders. The project will lead to two peer-reviewed articles on the ways that various groups used French in three locations: Haiti, Germany, and Russia. My grant will give me new skills in the Russian language and quantitative discourse analysis, which will be applied to conduct research in German, French, Luxembourgish, and American archives. A secondment in France will allow me to attend French cultural events in Paris before returning to Trier to meet Institut Français officials working in Frankfurt and Luxembourg. A writing project developed out of these meetings will communicate the global significance of my research. By uncovering the polyvocal origins of global francophonie, I demonstrate the importance of multilingualism for a cosmopolitan European identity today.