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WORDS

The road signs are in two languages and one of them is older

Breton, Alsatian, Occitan, and the Académie.

A shelf of dictionaries under a reading lamp — Forty seats, one dictionary, and a set of rulings the language routinely ignores.

Forty people, and no actual power
The Académie française rules on French and is routinely ignored, which is itself a reliable feature of the language.
France recognised its own languages late and reluctantly
Breton, Occitan, Alsatian and Corsican survived a century of active discouragement in schools; the constitutional position is still awkward.

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