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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 575

Part of Session 104: Microlinguistics and language planning (Other abstracts in this session)

Top-down or bottom-up? Understanding diffusion of supralocal norms in France.

Authors: Hornsby, David Christopher; Hall, Damien John
Submitted by: Hornsby, David Christopher (University of Kent, United Kingdom)

A plethora of studies now attest to regional dialect levelling (RDL) of a peculiarly rapid and intense kind in France (see for example Armstrong & Pooley 2011). The country’s regional languages (langues régionales) and ancestral Romance dialects are now moribund, and as these varieties die there is little evidence to suggest that city-based regional kinds of the kind found in the UK are replacing them. Even the traditionally distinct phonology of Southern France appears to be losing its marked features and showing some signs of convergence with Paris-based norms.

Explanations for RDL in France usually appeal either to ‘top-down’ factors - most notably a heavy-handed centralized language policy, often labelled ‘linguistic jacobinism’ - or to ‘bottom-up’ ones involving contact between speakers in urban areas: France’s late industrialization and the demographic dominance of its capital city in particular being seen as inhibiting the emergence of distinct urban vernaculars outside of Paris. We will however argue that such explanations are at best insufficient in accounting for the very different outcomes which have obtained in France and the UK.

Our purpose in this paper will therefore be twofold. Firstly, we will suggest that the structure of France’s urban settlements, in which for historical reasons social divisions are frequently reflected in physical segregation (e.g. through the suburban banlieue projects), actively inhibits ‘change from below’ of the kind witnessed recently in mainstream British English. We will then demonstrate from our own and other published findings that interesting and perhaps little noticed changes are in fact driving local divergence from the norm wherever specific geographical and social conditions are met.

Reference

Armstrong, N. and T. Pooley (2011) Social and Linguistic Change in European French. London: Palgrave Macmillan.