Is it true that french soldiers in WW1 didn't all understand each other in the trenches because they spoke different...

Is it true that french soldiers in WW1 didn't all understand each other in the trenches because they spoke different languages?
Was it the same for the other countries?

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They spoke French.

>there were no basques, Bretons, flemish, corsicans and Catalans in the French army
Sure mate

prove it

For the Austro-Hungarians, yes

eh it's mixed.

there were large swaths of the trenches that were manned more heavily by one nation's troops than another, hence why much more british soldiers participated at the Somme than French, it was in an area manned by British units. and why Verdun had much more French units involved than British, as it was in the French zones of the trenches.

when they did work together in similar numbers however, such as the Marne and Ypres, orders were given out in French, but most soldiers knew enough to understand basic orders and enough of the language to hold a simple conversation, and the higher ranking officers are usually educated in English/French.

Occitan, Brettonic, Walloon, and other regional languages were still widely spoken throughout France until the late 1940s when a major effort was made to push Parisian French throughout mainland France.

It's pretty interesting, in the 1871 census 1/4 French citizens could neither read nor write French.

>Catalans
French


Are you retarded

>basques, Bretons, flemish

They aren't French

>basques,
You're forgetting how dormant that population is in France, and how little of them they are. To say that them being in trenches would've equated to a huge cultural impact of no-one speaking the same tongue is silly.

>Bretons
One of the few groups you've called upon that would've used their own language even by the XXth century, but the greater part of them would've also known French since the Parisian elite had cast Normandy and Britanny as their vacationing homes.
My great great grandfather was a wealthy parisian who lived on the Breton coastline, and as such, was thrown into a Breton batallion when the war started, and he never had any problems communicating t his brothers-in-arms. Mind you, he was quickly transferred to something else though.

>flemish
Northern Frenchmen? They haven't been speaking that language for more than two or three centuries already.

>corsicans
There were lots of them so I wouldn't know. Then again, soldiers were usually assigned to batallions wherein there were others from their hometown regions, so it would've been entirely corsican-speaking batallions in their case, and they would've learned French quickly enough anyways.

>catalans
In France?

>read nor write French.
How does that equate to not knowing French though?

All regions in France spoke French since the late 18th century for the lastest ones
What is true on the other hand is that a lot of Alsatians conscripted in the German army couldn't speak a word of German and had thus to be packed together and under officers who could speak both French and German

In Canada, divisions were separate for anglophones and francophones, it was rare for an officer to speak both English and French.

Quebec originally resisted the war effort, so a lot of them never really joined, so it wasn't much of a problem in terms of a language barrier.

>hence why much more british soldiers participated at the Somme than French
It's actually false
The Somme had slightly more British Empire (=/= British) troops than French ones, but since a large chunk of them were Commonwealth troops while virtually all the French troops were from France, there were technically more French soldiers from France than there were British soldiers from the UK at the Somme

>and why Verdun had much more French units involved than British
There were literally no British troops fighting at Verdun, it was purely France vs Germany
How can you claim you know anything about WW1 without being aware of that?

>in a census done almost half century before WW1, 1/4 French citizens could not read or write, but literally nothing is mentioned as to their ability to speak French
>It's pretty interesting

You should know that compulsory education in France started in the 1880s.
Most French soldiers of WWI had been taught to read and write French in school.

I think by WW1 the majority of French citizens could speak French as a second language, probably quite fluently.

Isn't Roussillion Catalonia?

>>catalans
>In France?

Roussillon

it will be french before game is over

I thought Walloon was a dialect of French

>Flemish
>french

The area around Calais was flemish speaking in the past. Dunno when that changed.

They were all integrated very well, France is notorious for crushing the regional identities via centralization

>catalans
>not french

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Catalonia

educate yourself on your own fucking country jacques

They did until very recently, but to call the French-Flemish "Flemish" is fairly inaccurate
But it's true Dutch speaking Belgian soldiers died unnecessary because they couldn't always understand the french orders

the more I know about France the more I realize the evil of the Eternal Parisian knows no bounds

>Living in the same country with us mean that they're French

Nope

Wallon is French

As for Occitan it just Romanized French and their true name is Provençau/Roman not Occitan

yes they are

fuck off Jordi

>Catalan in charge of defining who is part of my ethnicty
kys