# Bernard Cerquiglini

Bernard Cerquiglini (born 8 April 1947 in Lyon, France), is a French linguist.
A Graduate of the École normale supérieure de Saint-Cloud, having received an agrégé and a doctorate in letters, he was a teacher of linguistics in University of Paris VII, former director of the National Institute for the French language, former vice-president of the Conseil supérieur de la langue française and president of the French National Reading Observatory. In 1995 Bernard Cerquiglini joined the Oulipo. He was in charge of a governmental studies on a French orthography reform and about national languages in France. He received the title Doctor Honoris Causa at ULIM.

## Biography

Bernard Cerquiglini is, through his paternal lineage, of Italian heritage from the region of Umbria (Perugia). He notably served as the director of schooling (in other words, primary education) at the French Ministry of Education (1985–1987), as director of the Institut national de la langue française, as vice president of Conseil supérieur de la langue française, as a member of General Delegation for the French language and the languages of France (for two terms), as president of Observatoire national de la lecture. He was tasked with reforms of French orthography, then to report on the languages of France by different French Prime Ministers, as well as the feminization of trade names.
Bernard Cequiglini joined Oulipo in 1995 He authored an "utobiographie de l'accent circonflexe" (Autobiography of the Circumflexa), under the title "L'Accent du souvenir" (the accent of memory), in it he played the role of "gardien de la langue" (guardian of the language) to defend its evolution and on certain occasions its simplification.
Cerquiglini's Eloge de la variante (Paris:Seuil, 1989; trans. in 1999 into English, In Praise of the Variant, 1999), marks the beginning of the scholarly paradigm referred to as "the New Medievalism" (also: the New Philology), which was critical of modernist positivist editorial practices for medieval texts. However, his claim that "[p]hilology is a bourgeois, paternalist, and hygienist system of thought about the family; it cherishes filiation, tracks down adulterers, and is afraid of contamination. Its thought is based on what is wrong (the variant being a form of deviant behaviour), and it is the basis for a positive methodology", was criticised by the Indologist Reinhold Grünendahl, who argued that the aim of Cerquiglini's work is not to contribution to a methodological debate but to confirm the premise of critical theory.
After his tenure as director of the Center for French and Francophone Studies at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, he became rector of the Agence universitaire de la Francophonie from 2007 to 2015. Since May 2020, Cerquiglini has been vice president of the Alliance française foundation.
He also presents a weekly short format program on TV5Monde about linguistics called Merci professeur !

## Distinctions

* Docteur honoris causa from the University of Bucharest, from the University of Budapest, from the Sichuan University of International Studies (Chongqing), from the University of Ouagadougou, and from the University of Assane Seck Ziguinchor
* Officer of the Légion d'honneur. He was knighted 31 December 1993.
* Commander of the Ordre des Palmes académiques
* Commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres promoted on 2 August 1993.