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1998
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Anna Mandich, « Roland de La Platière et la langue universelle », Dix-Huitième Siècle, ID : 10.3406/dhs.1998.2244
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J.-M. Roland de La Platière : Discours sur la langue universelle (1784). Presented by Anna Mandich. Amongst the manuscripts of Jean-Marie Roland conserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, there is a curious document entitled 'The causes which can make a language universal, and observations on the modern language which is most likely to become universal'. Roland is here discussing a relatively fashionable question, but in this work there is no allusion to the Berlin Academy's contemporaneous competition or to Rivarol's famous Discours. Roland develops an original theory for the time, namely that the only language likely to become universal was the English language, not the language of the English, but of the Americans which unites its own inherent qualities to those of the free, generous and tolerant people speaking it. Starting from these data, we here present his unpublished work with some hypotheses concerning the date and circumstances of its composition.