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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 293

Part of Session 173: Urban Francophone Language Practices in North America (Other abstracts in this session)

Francophone Contact in 19th-century Urban North America

Authors: Morin, Yves Charles (1); Martineau, France (2); Thibault, André (3)
Submitted by: Morin, Yves Charles (Université de Montréal, Canada)

Our paper focuses on the French spoken by francophones migrating to urban settings in North America. The 19th-century industrialization lead to the influx of a high proportion of francophones from rural areas into cities such as Montreal in Canada, or textile and mining towns in the United States. The new urban context, where English was strongly present if not dominant, increased cultural and linguistic transfers and promoted linguistic change. At the same time, the large francophone urban centers in North America were brought into increasingly closer contact with new standards from across the Atlantic, in particular through the influx of French religious congregations (Linteau 2000, Harvey 2008).

Using ego-documents, which consists of family letters and diaries that reflects the voices of ordinary speakers, we compare the phonetic, lexical and morphosyntactic characteristics of Acadian and Canadian French speakers that can be inferred from these documents. In particular, we examine how 19th-century ordinary speakers in Moncton and Montreal adjusted and conformed to the incoming European standard at a time when the identity discourses of the elites contributed to separate Acadia from Québec.

One important issue is whether this change was center-driven, first affecting large urban centers and spreading later to secondary ones: could Montreal have followed suit with Paris, and then Moncton with the latter (following the patterns described by Chambers and Trugill 1980 or Chambon 2004)? Or was it, on the contrary, less dependent on geographical space or the size of urban spaces and more on the social networks within these communities? Could it have spread differently when it concerns pronunciation, lexicon or morphosyntax?

Specific features of pronunciation, often difficult to assess in written documents, might reveal themselves through particular (mis)spellings, allowing us to examine how word-final consonants were affected. In particular word-final ‑r in the noun endings -oir, ‑eur was progressively restored in Québec and Acadia long after it had been in European urban varieties of French; conversely, word-final ‑t, which was retained longer in some specific words, as in nuit, lait or laid, tended to be given up at the same time or relegated to specific communicative registers. The identification of regional lexical specificities in written documents, on the other hand, is less problematic. We investigate here how lexical quebecisms and acadianisms fare with respect to their French equivalents. In morphosyntax, we examine the alternation between the subject clitic pronoun nous, on, je as a means to render the value “first person plural” and the use of the corresponding dislocated pronoun nous-autres. The use of the variant on was steadily expanding during the nineteenth century and that of je declining in urban areas both in France and in Québec; on the other hand je retained that use in Acadian urban settings.

 Our aim is to show what the study of ego-documents can bring to historical sociolinguistics, and contribute to the elaboration of an integrated model that takes into account phonetics, morphosyntax and lexicon, in combination with historical, sociological and demographic data.