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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 871

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

Social Mixing in HOMA: Young urban francophones and language variation

Authors: Blondeau, Hélène (1); Tremblay, Mireille (2)
Submitted by: Tremblay, Mireille (Université de Montréal, Canada)

Different types of social pressures have affected Montreal over the past 30 years.This recent reconfiguration of urban Montreal and its consequences in terms of social mixing have had an impact on language practices. Our paper illustrates this phenomenon by examining the trajectory of sociolinguistic variables in youth language in the neighborhood of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve (HOMA). 

This once prosperous neighborhood was particularly affected by the deindustrialization of Montreal, causing a general decline and the exodus of the middle class. This led to the development of strong community groups and new social networks.  More recently, migration toward HOMA from an adjacent working-class neighborhood, Centre-Sud, and major urban projects such as “Shops Angus” and Lavo, have contributed to social mixing and gentrification (Germain & Rose, 2010). Such major changes have been discussed by historians, sociologists, and urban planners, but the effect of social mixing on language has not been documented. 

According to previous variationnist studies adopting the real-time perspective, some sociolinguistic variables have shown an increase in the frequency of variants associated with the standard language (Sankoff & Blondeau 2007), pointing toward a devernacularisation process, defined as a loss of non-standard features (Mougeon 2005). In this paper, we compare two different sets of sociolinguistics data collected 35 years apart: the Lefebvre corpus collected in the 1970s in Centre-Sud and data from a new corpus collected in HOMA. We examine two linguistic variables involving the pronoun nous “we”. As a subject clitic nous has been replaced by on in a near-completed change (King et al. 2010)—a tendency at work in many varieties of French. In Quebec French, non-clitic nous alternates with nous-autres, which has recently decreased in frequency in a change in progress involving a reassignment of the roles according to linguistic and socio-stylistic dimensions  (Blondeau 2011).

Blondeau, H. 2011. Cet « autres » qui nous distingue. Tendances communautaires et parcours individuels dans le système des pronoms en français québécois. Presses de l’Université Laval.

Germain, A. & D. Rose (2010) « La mixité sociale programmée en milieu résidentiel à l’épreuve des discours critiques internationaux : le cas de Hochelaga à Montréal ».  Lien social et Politiques, Numéro 63, printemps 2010, p. 15-26.

King, R., F. Martineau et R. Mougeon 2011. « The Interplay of Internal and External Factors in Grammatical Change: First Person Plural Pronouns in French» Language 87.3:470-509.

Lefebvre, C. (dir.) 1982. La syntaxe comparée du français standard et populaire: Approchesformelle et fonctionnelle. Éditeur officiel du Québec, OLF, Collection Langues et Sociétés, 2 tomes.

Mougeon, R. 2005 « Rôle des facteurs linguistiques et extra-linguistiques dans la dévernacularisation du parler des adolescents dans les communautés francophones minoritaires du Canada », dans VALDMAN, Albert ; AUGER, Julie ; PISTON-HATLEN, Deborah. Le français en Amérique du Nord : état présent, Québec, Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2005, 261-285.

 Sankoff, G. & H. Blondeau (2007) “Language change across the lifespan: /r/ in Montreal French.” Language, 83, 560–614