Nos tutelles

CNRS Nom tutelle 1

Nos partenaires

Nom tutelle 2 Nom tutelle 3 Nom tutelle large



Accueil > Répertoire linguistique

The survey revealed that three-quarters of the children do not speak French before going to school, and also highlighted both the multilingualism and plurilingualism of the school population. Only 30% of children attending school – in French Guiana as a whole – reported that they spoke French before going to school (in some areas, 100% of the children did not speak it before going to school). At the age of ten, 93% of the children interviewed said they spoke at least two languages, 41% at least three languages and 11% at least four languages. French Guiana is therefore not only a multilingual region, its population is also largely plurilingual ; from a very young age children have plurilingual repertoires which continue to expand over the course of their lives.

The figure below presents the linguistic repertoires reported by all the schoolchildren interviewed. The top half of the figure shows the ‘languages of French Guiana’ included in the list of ‘languages of France’ drawn up by the Ministry of Culture.

By the ‘linguistic repertoire’ of the schoolchildren I understand the totality of the linguistic resources of this population : the languages and varieties which are considered to be ’mother tongues’ or languages of first socialisation (shown here in blue), as well as all the other forms available to the children, those which they have heard or acquired within the family, with their friends, or in any other informal context, or which they have acquired at school.

L1, L2 and L3 refer here to languages, acquired or learned, present in the children’s linguistic repertoires, in the order of their acquisition or learning. L1 generally refers to languages acquired during first socialisation, within the family and before starting school, while L2 and L3 are acquired after this period of first socialisation (for instance at school) or are less frequently used during childhood (for instance interactions with grandparents or school friends). L2 and L3 are thus heterogeneous categories.

This schematic presentation might suggest that individuals’ linguistic repertoires are a collection of different languages, or of different communication skills in different languages. But as Coste et al. (1997 : 12) observe

‘What we find here is not the superimposition or juxtaposition of skills that are always distinct, but rather one skill – plural, complex, even composite and heterogeneous – which includes singular or even partial skills, but is a unified repertoire available to the social actor in question’.

The dynamic aspect of this plurilingual and pluricultural skill emerges as soon as we investigate the speakers’ language practices or their biographies.

Children can, for example, use and associate the languages and linguistic resources in their repertoire according to the people they speak to :