Make ‘glottophobia’ over regional accents a crime, says French MP

A FRENCH MP has tabled a bill to punish discrimination against regional accents – dubbed “glottophobia” – after one of the country’s highest-profile politicians mocked a journalist’s southern intonation.

The proposal came a day after Jeanluc Mélenchon, leader of the far-left La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) movement and a former presidential candidate, was caught on camera haranguing a journalist with a southern accent who asked him a question outside parliament.

French police raided Mr Mélenchon’s party headquarters on Tuesday after prosecutors opened an inquiry into suspected campaign financing violations and “fake jobs” for EU parliament assistants. He was questioned for five hours on Thursday.

Asked for a comment from a journalist from the south-western city of Toulouse, where silent vowels are more “sung” than further north, a clearlyirked Mr Mélenchon hit back mockingly: “Qu’esseuh-que ça veut direuh ?” (the French equivalent of saying, “Whata doesa thata mean?”). “Can someone ask me a question in French? And [make it] a bit more understandable,” Mr Mélenchon asked reporters.

It prompted an angry response from Laetitia Avia, a Paris MP. “Do we speak French any the less with an accent?” she asked. “Must one suffer humiliation if one doesn’t speak standard French? Because our accents are our identity, I am tabling a bill to recognise glottophobia as a source of discrimination.”

Regional accents are “an integral part of many French people’s identity”, said the MP, who is from Emmanuel Macron’s La République en Marche party.

She was backed by Jean-luc Moudenc, mayor of Toulouse, who tweeted: “In Toulouse, we speak French too … but with the sun in our voice. It’s a marker of our identity, a source of pride and I hope many of us will remind [Mr Mélenchon] of that.”