Social and Linguistic Change in European French: A Trans-National Perspective

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Social and Linguistic Change in European French

10.1057/9780230281714 - Social and Linguistic Change in European French, Nigel Armstrong and Tim Pooley



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Nigel Armstrong University of Leeds, UK

and

Tim Pooley London Metropolitan University, UK




© Nigel Armstrong and Tim Pooley 2010

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–21950–2 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Armstrong, Nigel. Social and linguistic change in European French / Nigel Armstrong and Tim Pooley. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–21950–2 1. French language—Social aspects—Foreign countries. 2. French language—Social aspects—France. 3. French language—Variation. 4. Sociolinguistics. I. Pooley, Timothy, 1949– II. Title. PC2074.75.A78 2010 447—dc22 2010004047 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.


For Sylvia, Katherine and Jonathan; and for Ameus and his wonderful parents, Helen and Owen



Π αντ ´ α ρ\ ε˜I


List of Tables

x

List of Maps

xvii

1 The Links Between Social and Linguistic Change 1.1 The research themes studied in this book 1.2 Levelling 1.3 Structure of the book 2 Standardisation and Language Change in France, Belgium and Switzerland 2.1 Linguistic and social levelling 2.2 The sociolinguistic situations of western Europe 2.3 The dominance of a hypercephalic capital 2.4 Describing the centre 2.5 Language and nation 2.6 Belgium 2.7 Switzerland 2.8 The francophone area in a western European perspective 2.9 Shift and maintenance of minority autochtonous varieties 2.10 The post-industrial and post-diaglossic era 2.11 Historical situations and social changes in the second half of the 20th century 3 Social Levelling: Substantive Transformations, Changing Social Practices and Symbolic Representations 3.1 Introduction 3.2 The emergence of the post-industrial economy 3.3 Changes in occupational structure 3.4 Urbanisation 3.5 Changing gender roles 3.6 Migration 3.7 Internationalisation 3.8 Media and popular culture

1 1 4 7

8 8 8 12 15 20 26 31 35 36 39 40

44 44 46 50 59 70 74 78 80

vii



Contents

viii

Contents

3.9

4 Accents and Levelling in France, Belgium and Switzerland 4.1 Linguistic levelling in the light of social levelling 4.2 The reference pronunciation of France and the ideology of the standard 4.3 Attempting to define Reference French 4.4 Stylistic variation: omission or insertion phenomena? 4.4.1 Variation in the liquid consonants /l/ and /r/ 4.4.2 Variable liaison 4.4.3 Mute-e 4.5 The education system and the acquisition of Standard French in France 4.6 Is there a southern (Provençal) regional standard? 4.7 The emergence of alternative prestigious pronunciations in Francophonie Nord: the example of Quebec 4.8 Prestigious pronunciations in Belgium 4.9 Prestigious pronunciations in Suisse romande 5 The Levelling of Regional Varieties in France 5.1 The problematic nature of identifying regional accents in France 5.2 The relation between regional, social and stylistic variation 5.3 Regional variation in middle-class Oïl usage in the early to mid-20th century 5.4 Marked regional varieties in the early to mid-20th century 5.5 Vernacular Parisian as a regional variety 5.6 Lille and the Nord–Pas-de-Calais 5.7 Brittany and Normandy 5.8 Eastern regions of France 5.9 The northern Oc region and southward spread of supralocal French

84

88 96

100 100 101 105 111 112 114 115 120 123

125 126 138 150 150 153 158 161 165 169 175 180 183



(i) Symbolic changes and the late 20th-century zeitgeist: evolving social and national identities 3.9 (ii) Symbolic changes and the late 20th-century zeitgeist: evolving social practices and representations in the everyday 3.10 Concluding remarks

Contents ix

Overview of non-southern French Southern France (i) the traditional situation Southern France (ii) the results of more recent studies Summary of the situation in southern France

6 Regional Vernacular Varieties and Language Levelling in Belgium and Switzerland 6.1 Overview 6.2 Brussels vernacular 6.3 Regional varieties in Wallonia – substrate and perceptions 6.4 Descriptions in the 1970s and 1980s 6.5 Variationist studies 6.6 The Borinage (Thiam, 1995) 6.7 Mons (Moreau and Bauvois, 1998; Bauvois, 2001, 2002a, 2002b) 6.8 Brussels, Gembloux, Liège and Tournai (Hambye, 2005) 6.9 The findings of perceptual studies and summary of the Belgian situation 6.10 The Francoprovençal substrate in Suisse romande 6.11 Regional varieties (Geneva, Neuchâtel, Valais) 6.12 The Vaud: behaviour and perceptions 6.13 More recent perceptions of marked varieties in the Vaud (Singy, 1996) 6.14 Conclusion 7 Social Factors: Bringing Together Class, Gender, Migration, Ideology and Language 7.1 Overview of the chapter 7.2 Social class 7.3 Gender 7.4 Historical perspectives on the sociolinguistic consequences of migration 7.5 Urban youth vernaculars 7.6 Concluding remarks

185 186 193 202 205 205 205 211 214 217 218 222 227 235 236 237 240 243 246 249 249 249 253 260 263 273

References

277

Index

297



5.10 5.11 5.12 5.13

2.1

Typology of standard dialect constellations in Europe (Auer, 2005) 2.2 Centre-Periphery model (Reynaud, 1981) 2.3 Populations of francophone cities and areas 2.4 Comparative GDP of France, Belgium and Switzerland with purchasing power parity (PPP) in the 21st century 2.5 French and Dutch speakers in 19th-century Brussels 2.6 Population of Belgium 2.7 Two economic indicators in the three regions of Belgium (2005–08) (Eurostat, Brussels) 2.8 Percentage proportions of Brussels residents able to speak various languages well or perfectly (Janssens, 2008: 4) 2.9 French-speaking population in francophone cantons and part-cantons 3.1 Working population in France by sector (1911–2006) 3.2 Working population in Belgium by sector 3.3 Working population in Switzerland (1920–2003) 3.4 Relative prosperity in France, Belgium and Switzerland, with comparisons for USA and European neighbours at the turn of the 21st century 3.5 Gini index for Belgium, France, Switzerland and selected countries 3.6 Socio-professional categories used by Singy (1996: 72–3) 3.7 Comparison of educational categories in the Lille (Lefebvre, 1991) and Mons studies (Bauvois, 2002a) 3.8 Educational achievement in France (percentages) by age and gender in 2007 3.9 Favourability to success at school and parents’ profession 3.10 Urbanites and population density in a number of western European countries at the turn of the 21st century (Johnstone and Mandryk, 2001; Bassand, 2004)

9 13 15 17 19 27 28

30 32 47 47 47

49 53 54 55 55 56

60

x



List of Tables

List of Tables xi

68 70 72 75 76

81 91 102 106 109

112

113

114

117 117

119 121



3.11 Populations of major urban areas and urban centres in Wallonia 3.12 The major (fully and partly) francophone cities of Switzerland (Schuler, 2003) 3.13 Gender equality in France, Belgium and Switzerland (1= equality) (Haussmann, Tyson and Zahidi, 2008) 3.14 Proportion of foreign residents in selected European countries 3.15 Geographical distribution of foreigners in Belgium in 2006 3.16 Average daily time (in minutes) spent watching television in selected European countries (Poesmens, 2005) 3.17 Religious affiliation by percentage of population in selected countries (Johnstone and Mandryk, 2001) 4.1 List of social groups cited as exemplars of Reference French (Laks, 2002) 4.2 The oral vowel phonemes of the prescriptive norm (PN) Müller, 1985: 83) 4.3 Consonantal phonemes of the prescriptive norm (Müller, 1985; Lyche, forthcoming 2010) 4.4 Total numbers (N) and percentage deletion rates (%) for /l/-deletion in subject clitic pronouns except il + C: group scores (Armstrong, 1993) 4.5 Total numbers, percentage deletion rates and style shift for /r/ in the sequence WFPOLD + V: e.g. in je vais être en cinquième (Armstrong, 1993) 4.6 Variable liaison in 1960–61 and 1995–96 on public-service radio in France (Ågren, 1973; Smith, 1996) 4.7 Total numbers (N) and percentage insertion rates (%) for mute-e in the context: VC_CV, e.g. in la semaine in Dieuze (Armstrong, 1993) 4.8 Mute-e insertion in monosyllabic words in (V)C_C(V) as in: c’est dans le bureau (Hansen, 2000) 4.9 Rate of realisation of pre-pausal schwa after a single consonant in Hansen’s 1989 and 1993 data (Hansen and Mosegaard Hansen, 2003), as in: c’est Pierre-euh, bonjour-euh 4.10 Mise en mots of primary-school pupils in Le Havre regarding French lessons (Caitucoli et al., 2003: 21)

List of Tables

4.11 4.12

‘Regional standard’ in Provence (Taylor, 1996) Perceived comparisons of variety status (Moreau and Brichard, 1999b: 29–30) 4.13 Responses to statement: ‘Le meilleur français, c’est celui que parlent les Français’ (Francard, 1993: 25) 4.14 Countries where (a) the best and (b) the worst French is spoken (Francard, 1993: 27–8) 4.15a Oral vowels in open stressed syllables by middle-class Brussels speaker (born 1950) of francophone background (Walter, 1982: 110) 4.15b Oral vowels in unstressed and closed syllables by middle-class Brussels speaker (born 1950) of francophone background (Walter, 1982: 110) 4.16 Non-supralocal features of ‘unmarked’ Belgian French 4.17 Use of non-supralocal features on RTBF news 4.18 Oral vowels in word-final stressed syllables in varieties used in Suisse romande (Métral, 1977: 168) with points of contrast in Burgundy (Martinet, 1945) in parentheses 4.19 Oral vowels in non-final stressed syllables in varieties used in Suisse romande (Métral, 1977: 168) with points of contrast in Burgundy (Martinet, 1945) in parentheses 4.20 Proportion of claimed merged pronunciations among Swiss secondary-school students in selected lexical items for /œ/-/˜ ˜ E/ (Schoch et al., 1980: 10) 4.21 Recognition of short and long vowels by students from Neuchâtel and Paris (Grosjean et al., 2007) 4.22 Use of non-supralocal French features in TSR evening news March-April 2009 5.1 Correlation between rank order of Nancy speakers by perception as working-class and rates of word-final post-obstruent liquid deletion (Armstrong and Boughton, 2009: 14) 5.2a The middle-class non-southern vowel distribution (Martinet, 1945: 206) 5.2b The middle-class non-southern vowel distribution (Martinet, 1945: 206) 5.3 Supralocal French-divergent vocalic features in regional varieties (Walter, 1982; Carton et al., 1983)

124 130 130 131

132

133 133 137

144

144

145 146 147

151 160 160 163



xii

List of Tables xiii

5.4

164

167 171 171

172

173 173 174

174 180 183 188 188

191 192

196 197 198



Supralocal French-divergent consonant features in regional varieties (Walter, 1982; Carton et al., 1983) 5.5 Comparison of Parisian vernacular in the 1970s and 1990s (Carton et al., 1983: 84; Armstrong and Jamin, 2002: 132) 5.6 The ‘dialect mix’ 5.7 Chronological loss of Picard items in Lille (Pooley, 2004: 344) 5.8 The Lillois phonological sub-system. Phonological contrasts ordered according to likelihood of neutralisation (Lefebvre, 1991) 5.9 The Lillois phonetic sub-system. Phonetic differences from the prescriptive norm ordered by vernacular prominence (Lefebvre, 1991) 5.10 Level of education and frequency of use of variants (Lefebvre, 1991) 5.11 Use of [A], [æö] and [O] by level of education (Pooley, 1996) 5.12 Regional features specifically mentioned by informants in two perceptual studies (Landrecies, 2001: 207–8; Eloy et al., 2003: 207) 5.13 Intergenerational changes in Domfront (Girard and Lyche, 2003) 5.14 Distinctive length differences in close and open vowels in Besançon French (based on Rittaud-Hutinet, 2001) 5.15a Claimed middle-class southern oral-vowel distribution in the 1940s (Martinet, 1945: 208) 5.15b Claimed middle-class southern oral-vowel distribution in the 1940s (Martinet, 1945: 2008) 5.16 Use of southern consonantal variants by speakers born 1900–1950 (Brun, 1931; Séguy, 1951; Walter, 1982 (detailed profiles); Carton et al., 1983) 5.17 Use of consonantal variants in Walter (1982): all southern speakers 5.18 Schwa deletion among school students by gender and social class (conversational style) (Armstrong and Unsworth, 1999) 5.19 Nasal vowel realisations in Aix-en-Provence (Taylor, 1996: 88) 5.20 Realisations of /e/-/E/ in Aix-en-Provence (Taylor, 1996: 105–11)

xiv List of Tables

199 206

208

208

208 215 218

220

221 222 224

225 225 228 228

229

230



5.21 Realisations of /o/-/O/ in aube, robe in Aix-en-Provence (Taylor, 1996: 76) 6.1 Sociolinguistic profile of Belgian nationals in Brussels in the mid-20th century 6.2 Realisation of vowels in stressed position among working-class Brussels bilinguals in the 1960s (Baetens-Beardsmore, 1971: 76) 6.3 Oral vowels in open stressed syllables by working-class Brussels speaker (born 1896) of Flemish background (Walter, 1982) 6.4 Oral vowels in unstressed and closed syllables by working-class Brussels speaker (born 1896) of Flemish background (Walter, 1982) 6.5 Features of marked accents in five locations in Wallonia (based on Walter, 1982; Francard, 1989a) 6.6 The locations of recent sociolinguistic studies in Belgium 6.7 Proportion of sample using alveolar [r] and uvular [ö] or both variants [ö±] in the Borinage, by education and age (Thiam, 1995: 83) 6.8 Proportion of sample using alveolar [r] and uvular [ö] or both variants [ö±] in the Borinage, by education, age and gender (Thiam, 1995: 84) 6.9 Four-point scale of levels of educational achievement used in Mons studies (Bauvois, 2002a, 2002b) 6.10 Variables selected for study in Bauvois (2002a, 2002b) 6.11 Overall percentage frequencies of occurrence in Mons study (Bauvois 2002a, 2002b) for Definition (D), Reading (R) and Conversation (C) tasks for seven variables 6.12 Frequencies of use of two variables across three styles by gender and social class (Bauvois, 2002a) 6.13 Social profile of speakers 6.14 Location and variables studied by Hambye (2005) 6.15 Overall rates of WFCD in Conversation in Gembloux and Tournai by age and level of education (Hambye, 2005: 151) 6.16 Overall rates of WFCD in Conversation in Gembloux and Tournai by gender and social mobility (Hambye, 2005: 151)

List of Tables xv

232 233 233

234

235 239

240

240 241

242

242

243 244 250 255 265



6.17 Most frequently occurring variants of /r/ by percentage for Reading Tasks for 47 speakers from Brussels, Gembloux, Liège and Tournai 6.18 Percentage use of SAVs in Reading Task and Conversation for 47 speakers, by age and education 6.19 Percentage frequency of SAVs by speakers from four locations, by age (Hambye, 2005: 237) 6.20 Frequency of use of schwa in combined conversational styles for four contexts by speakers from Gembloux, Liège and Tournai, by age and level of education (Hambye, 2005: 320–3) 6.21 Geographical and age distribution of overall schwa realisation in conversation style (Hambye, 2005: 325) 6.22 Comparison of Walter’s Valaisain informants with regard to key Swiss features 6.23 Percentage proportions of claimed mergers among Swiss secondary-school pupils in selected lexical items for /œ/-/˜ ˜ E/(Schoch et al., 1980: 10) 6.24 Percentage proportions of Swiss secondary-school pupils accepting douze-douce and vide-vite as acceptable rhymes (Schoch et al., 1980: 14) 6.25 Profiles of informants interviewed by Andreassen (2006: 116) 6.26 Comparison of Vaud speaker (Walter, 1982: 195) with PFC data (Andreassen and Lyche, 2003; Andreassen, 2004, 2006) for oral vowels in open syllables 6.27 Comparison of Vaud speaker (Walter, 1982) with PFC data (Andreassen and Lyche, 2003; Andreassen, 2004, 2006) for oral vowels in checked syllables 6.28 Comparison of Vaud speaker (Walter, 1982) with PFC data (Andreassen and Lyche, 2003; Andreassen, 2004, 2006) for nasal vowels 6.29 Towns and districts of the Vaud studied in Singy (1996) listed by zones 7.1 Upward drift of educational attainment in Mons region (Thiam, 1995; Bauvois, 2002a) 7.2 Degrees of /o/ fronting based on formant frequency analysis (Armstrong and Low, 2008: 448) 7.3 Divergent phonological features in La Courneuve (Armstrong and Jamin, 2002: 132)

xvi List of Tables

7.5 7.6 7.7

Affrication of dental and velar stops in two styles in La Courneuve (Jamin, 2005: 43) Affrication by style, age and gender in La Courneuve (Armstrong and Jamin, 2002: 133) Style shift in use of back /a/ and open /o/ (Marcq-en-Barœul, 1995; Lille-Sud, 2005) Use of back /a/ and open /o/ by gender and ethnicity (Group Conversation) (Marcq-en-Barœul, 1995; Lille-Sud, 2005)

266 267 271

271



7.4

2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 6.1 6.2

The linguistic and territorial divisions of Belgium The linguistic and territorial divisions of Switzerland The major urban areas of Francophone Europe The Île-de-France region Commuting to and from Lille in the Nord–Pas-de-Calais in the 1990s The urban areas of Wallonia The major urban areas of Switzerland The métropole lémanique The supralocal French area as defined by Armstrong (2001) Bilingualism in the autochtonous languages of France (Pottier, 1968) The so-called pays des Chtimis Documented spread of supralocal French in France Southern France showing localities investigated in a sociolinguistic perspective The traditional dialect regions of Wallonia (Rossillon, 1995: 57; Lechanteur, 1997: 85) Mons-Borinage

29 33 62 63 65 67 68 69 154 157 170 186 187 212 219

xvii



List of Maps



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The Links Between Social and Linguistic Change

1.1 The research themes studied in this book The principal research theme examined in this book is variation, and to some extent change, in the pronunciation of contemporary European French, considered from the viewpoint of how language change has reflected and continues to reflect social changes in the principal Frenchspeaking countries of Europe. It is of course axiomatic that variation can indicate change, and the study of language variation and change implies consideration of accounts of past linguistic behaviour and the sociolinguistic functions that speakers exercise in their present variable pronunciation. This further connected theme has therefore to do with differences between the processes of social change that have occurred in these countries. We leave detailed consideration of this issue until Chapter 3, but briefly, this latter purpose focusses on whether we can legitimately talk of an ‘exception culturelle’ that sets the francophone countries apart in their linguistic behaviour from the rather notable increase of informality observable in most Western liberal countries, manifested in what is sometimes referred to as social levelling. For the most part we will examine here quantitative evidence of sociolinguistic functioning of the kind that derives from the variationist or Labovian method, summarised below. We adopt a comparative approach by looking at the sociolinguistic situations in France, Belgium and Switzerland, including the Dutch- and German-speaking areas. We glance at English too, partly because results are copious and examples will be familiar to many readers, and partly because the way in which social levelling is working out in the UK contrasts interestingly with the continental European situations. 1



1


We recognise that any cross-linguistic or cross-cultural comparison is to a large extent arbitrary. As Kerswill and Williams remark (2002: 81): ‘Because of the uniqueness of every case of language change and the problem of finding controls, it is extremely difficult to predict, for a particular constellation of factors, exactly what the outcome will be.’ Certainly no benchmark language is available, since no language can be taken as the default with regard to language change or indeed in any other perspective, but although it appears plausible on a superficial view that recent social change has proceeded in essentially similar ways in Western post-industrial liberal democracies having standard languages, the different social, cultural and political traditions in these countries seem to make comparisons worthwhile. Indeed, against the contention of Kerswill and Williams may be cited Auer (2005: 7), who suggests that ‘on a sufficient level of generalisation there is a systematicity behind the superficial heterogeneity [of standard–dialect situations in European languages] which unfolds from a historical perspective’. A comparison of the French, Belgian and Swiss situations is therefore motivated in that they have in common a standard language, however that term applies to the various other languages spoken within their borders and however their dialects differ in relation to it. Thus the essential similarities between the countries mean that a comparison is more motivated than would be a study comparing two languages having very different structures, as well as being situated within markedly different cultural and socio-economic modes of organisation. As stated above, the Labovian programme is central to the present work, because its main concern is to understand how linguistic change is actuated and diffused by studying patterns of, and interactions between, synchronic linguistic variation along the social and stylistic dimensions of language use. The Labovian emphasis on the mechanisms rather than the social motivations of language change reflects the agenda set by Labov in the early 1960s. Although a few early studies foreshadowed his pioneering work on linguistic variation, Labov was the first to show the structured nature of linguistic variation and change, and to bring to light systematic correlations between speakers’ demographic attributes (principally social class, age, sex and ethnicity) and their orientation to the standard language. He did this by developing a methodology that enabled him to study linguistic change and how it penetrates linguistic contexts, as well as spreading socially. The present work is concerned similarly with the examination of these patterns of variation, and has as its principal aim the relation between variation and change; but we claim a fresh approach because we reflect



2

on the way in which patterns of language variation and change track, or are otherwise related to, social change, this latter considered in greater detail than hitherto. In variationist sociolinguistics, the emphasis so far mostly has been on how changes work through certain linguistic contexts, and by the agency of certain social groups. By contrast, there has been relatively little investigation, at least on a large social scale, into the ways in which language change mirrors social change, apart from a few micro-studies that have had this emphasis. If it is accepted that social change drives linguistic change (an axiom of sociolinguistics) then it must be that large-scale processes of language change like levelling are similarly motivated, as the great French historical linguist Meillet (1921: 17–18) suggested in general terms some time ago: The only variable element to which one can turn to explain linguistic change is social change [. . .] and it is changes in the structure of society which alone can modify the conditions of existence of a language. We need to determine which social structure corresponds to a given linguistic structure and how, in general, changes in social structure translate into changes in linguistic structure. This then is the concern of the present book. We do indeed accept that social change drives linguistic change, while recognising that internal pressures can also prompt language change. But we recognise too the imprecision of the formulation that ‘social change drives linguistic change’ and adopt here the approach that stresses the link between variable pronunciation and social identity, such that speakers are capable of adopting phonological adjustments in order to gain social advantage by alignment to the desired ‘reference group’. Many if not most speakers of a language are capable of imitating varieties other than their own. Imitation or mimicry, which by definition take place over the short term, are however very different from long-term accommodation to a reference group, with all the psychosocial investment that implies. The reference group was defined by Merton (1957: 287) as: ‘any of the groups of which one is a member, and these are comparatively few, as well as groups of which one is not a member, and these are, of course, legion, [which] can become reference points for shaping one’s attitudes, evaluations and behavior’. The position then is essentially that speakers may adopt new linguistic forms, the property of a given reference group, because they seek thereby to gain social advantage or avoid disadvantage. As Labov points out (2001: 191), this view is similar to that articulated by Le Page and Tabouret-Keller (1985), who expressed their



The Links Between Social and Linguistic Change 3


perspective on the adoption of linguistic forms with this purpose in the well-known phrase ‘acts of identity’. The concept of social identity, central to the study of the relations between society and language as well as many other social practices, is useful in attempting to explore the relationships between opposites like group and individual, status and solidarity, in-group and out-group. Individual social identity, a psychosocial continuity which is at the same time susceptible to development, is difficult to theorise or even describe with much rigour, because it is multi-faceted and dynamic and perhaps most obviously experienced subjectively. It is perhaps rarely the object of conscious reflection, and is composed of elements which are in any event recalcitrant to precise measurement or even definition: class, gender, age, region and ethnicity are the most frequently evoked. Even if some of these categories are more discrete, or less abstract, than others, they are all ‘moving targets’ in the sense of being capable of ongoing development or construction, both in the short and long term. Social identity is of course a concept, however difficult of application, but is based on psychological reality. It is central to the present enterprise, but we approach it in the customary, rough-and-ready way through the social components mentioned above: class, age, gender, etc.

1.2 Levelling The social concept we investigate here is a kind of symbolic social levelling: the nexus of attitudes that tend to erode hierarchical structures, emphasise the worth of the individual, promote the values of youth and accelerate the decline of deference. This symbolic social levelling is of course driven by real change: political, economic, demographic and other. We present here a good deal of detail that goes some way to explaining the process, while recognising that the zeitgeist, the cultural climate that shapes much of contemporary social practice, partakes of a large element of the imponderable. A descriptive-analytical literature on levelling seems to be lacking, although some French scholars have approached the subject in a committed way, either criticising the phenomenon (Finkielkraut, 1987) or applauding it (Maffesoli, 1988). A paper by Wouters (1986) refers to the process as ‘informalisation’, but this term, though intuitive, is unfortunate as it is current in economics in a quite different sense relating to the parallel economy. Also relevant to this issue is the set of concepts associated with the post-modernist enterprise which lays stress on the blurring between high culture and low culture, among many other social and intellectual phenomena.



4

What lends interest to the French situation is the ‘republican elitism’ that promotes, at least in intention, an upward rather than downward levelling. This is reflected in a resistance to linguistic variation and change that is institutionalised in France in ways that are far to seek in comparable countries. The obvious linguistic corollary of social change in the direction of symbolic convergence is the attenuation of ‘prestige’ forms and the promotion of ‘change from below’: the adoption by middle-class speakers of working-class language features. This latter is a phenomenon attested, in English and other European languages, by a considerable number of quantitative results, and while French data are increasingly available, the phenomenon seems rarer, at least in pronunciation. Dialect levelling is currently a prominent focus of interest in sociolinguistics, understandably so in view of the processes of social and geographical mobility currently weakening a social fabric that has hitherto been fairly cohesive. Foulkes and Docherty (1999: 13) have the following definition that is widely cited: Levelling differs from standardisation (or dedialectalisation) in that speakers do not automatically abandon their local forms in preference for the standard. Rather, there appears to be a tension between speakers’ desire to continue signalling loyalty to their local community by using local speech norms, and a concurrent urge to appear outward-looking or more cosmopolitan. This definition, while it might correspond to the UK situation and others, contrasts sharply with what was suggested above concerning French. One of the substantial findings of quantitative sociolinguistics is nevertheless that most language change proceeds from below. The major difference between France and a number of other comparable countries is that the social-regional stereotypes underlying urban vernaculars seem to be exploited in these latter countries in opposition to traditionally prestigious language varieties, and hence of course to the social values they represent. This picture does not sit comfortably with the overarching description of linguistic variation that Chambers and Trudgill saw fit to retain in the second edition of their much cited textbook. The authors make claims for their generalisations that can be read as universal (1998: 70): One plausible explanation for linguistic variability focusses on the fact that whenever there is class differentiation in a linguistic





variable, it is the variant used by the higher classes that is ascribed more prestige than the other variants. As a result, in situations in which attention is directed towards speech, speakers of all classes will tend to increase their use of the higher-status variants. Stylistic variation, by this explanation, is a direct result of social-class variation. Differences in social class give rise to the assigning of value judgements to particular linguistic variants, and formal situations lead to a greater use of the highly valued pronunciations. In short, a social hierarchy is reflected directly in a linguistic hierarchy, and by derivation in a stylistic hierarchy. That fact of a variable being involved in change calls for another sort of account, since most change proceeds ‘from below’, i.e. from the adoption by middle-class speakers of hitherto working-class variants. In Chambers and Trudgill’s logic, this would entail either a mutation of the social hierarchy, or what may be the same thing, the reassignment to the adopted variant of a prestige previously denied it; that is, a kind of legitimating of the variant by the standard language, or by certain of its speakers. Mutations of this type are the subject of the present work. Since the initiation of the Labovian programme in the early 1960s, which is also the time when the social changes we examine began to gather momentum, they appear to be close to universal, and yet they remain under-investigated. While in the UK and other countries sociolinguistic phenomena seem broadly to track the zeitgeist which encourages informalisation, as witnessed by the decline of Received Pronunciation, what is happening in European French calls for description and theorisation that seem less intuitive, since despite the presence of similar (but not identical) macro-social factors the linguistic tracking is harder to fit into patterns or sub-patterns attested both in the UK and in other parts of Europe. This seems to be because the social-regional dialect pattern in France has been levelled to a large extent already, where the term ‘levelling’ is used in the contrary sense of the erosion of low-value dialect features in favour of the standard. In contrast to what is happening elsewhere, we appear to be witnessing, in French pronunciation, particularly in France, a process of modified change from above and below that sees the standard, or more neutrally, the supralocal variety, supplanting most of the others, to the point where the social patterning manifested elsewhere in variable pronunciation appears to be shifting to the grammar and lexicon. The term ‘supralocal’ seems preferable since it does not necessarily connote the prestige that inevitably attaches to the standard.



6


This book is organised as follows. Chapter 2 considers firstly the typology of standardisation and language change proposed by Auer (2005), in relation to France, Belgium and Switzerland, before discussing the demographic and geographical conditions that have shaped the various standardisation patterns. Chapter 3 considers the changing social practices that, as stated above, have come about partly as a result of the economic and demographic shifts of recent times. We present these at the level of detail necessary to provide an adequate backdrop for the description of linguistic variation and change presented in subsequent chapters. In Chapter 4 we discuss the various linguistic descriptions of the prestige standard or supralocal varieties of francophone Europe, and describe some of the non-regional changes observable in recent times. Chapters 5 and 6, by contrast, focus in detail on the spread of supralocal French at the expense of localised varieties, in France (Chapter 5) and in Belgium and Switzerland (Chapter 6). In Chapter 7 we consider the effects of social class, gender and ethnicity, as specifically manifested in the three countries selected for study.



1.3 Structure of the book

Standardisation and Language Change in France, Belgium and Switzerland

2.1 Linguistic and social levelling In the following chapter we give an account of the social changes that have occurred in western European countries from the 1960s, an epoch generally accepted as a key turning-point. The changes, whether substantive like the rise in the numbers of people entering post-compulsory education, the decline in those working in industry and agriculture; or attitudinal like the decline of deference and the corresponding increase of informality, describable as the zeitgeist, appear to have affected western countries in analogous ways in many areas of social practice. It is however undeniable that these changes have occurred in societies possessing very different linguistic traditions.

2.2 The sociolinguistic situations of western Europe While periods of social upheaval are reflected in linguistic behaviour, language change follows social transformation in ways that are difficult to generalise meaningfully across linguistic communities. Perhaps the most authoritative transnational overview of language change in recent decades in various parts of Europe is that of Auer, Hinskens and Kerswill (2005), who coordinated a collection of articles covering the convergence and divergence of dialects in Europe in eleven European countries. In its geographical coverage, Fandrych and Salverda’s (2007) volume on Germanic languages is complementary and overlapping. One of the major gaps in these two volumes is the lack of detailed reference to the francophone areas, the issue we address here. We shall argue that the rather extreme situation of France in particular, sometimes referred to in political, social, cultural and other terms as the exception française, 8



2

can add a valuable additional element to the picture, set in comparison with the constellation of highly differentiated situations sketched in broad outline below, particularly when one adopts a sufficiently long time frame is adopted, as Auer does (2005). Indeed Auer argues, speculatively but with much coherence, for a high degree of commonality of historico-sociolinguistic situations over a range of European countries. Historically, the key fact was the undoing of diglossia between Latin and a national variety which led (in some cases not immediately) between the 16th and 19th centuries to the abandonment of Latin as the H form and the promotion of a vernacular in most but not all cases as a national standard. The diglossic situation as between Latin and a number of autochtonous varieties is classed as Type 0, and Auer outlines four other cases based on a limited number of key notions, summarised in Table 2.1. For France, the unravelling of the Latin–vernacular diglossia of the Middle Ages in favour of an emerging standard variety by the 17th century has been throroughly documented by Lodge (1993) using Haugen’s well-known model (1966). This depicts standardisation as a series of partly successive, partly concurrent processes: (a) selection, (b) acceptance, (c) elaboration of function, (d) codification and (e) maintenance, and it accords with Auer’s attenuated version characterising the written standard as the H variety in a diglossic situation and bearing at least some marks of codification and elaboration (Auer, 2005: 8). According Table 2.1 Typology of standard dialect constellations in Europe (Auer, 2005) Type

Description

Examples

0

Diglossia with exoglossic H variety

Latin in Middle Ages; French in royal or imperial courts in German-speaking areas in 18th century

A

Medial diglossia with endoglossic standard mostly confined to writing

16th-century Paris; German-speaking Switzerland

B

To Type A is added Spoken diglossia, i.e. standard variety adopted in the speech of educated urbanites with regional variation

Austria; Flanders

C

Diaglossia. Spoken standard with regional standards and regional vernaculars

United Kingdom; Italy

D

Post diglossia and post diaglossia

Northern France; Denmark



Standardisation and Language Change 9


to Auer’s model, the emergence of Standard French occurred early, and from his broad transnational perspective, in a relatively straightforward manner. This should not be construed as suggesting that the transition from Type 0 to Type A was not the result of a prolonged period of competition, for this lasted from the appearance of the earliest written texts considered as French, dating from the 9th century, up to the 17th century, by which time French had been codified and had replaced Latin in all but a few domains of writing and formal speech (theology, for instance). This phase is characterised by medial diglossia, where, in Lodge’s account, competing standard varieties were used in various parts of the Langue d’Oïl area, although this conflicts with the dominant orthodoxy among French-based scholars of a common composite written form, or what Carton (1992) calls the ‘compromis inter-régional d’Oïl’. The vernacular variety in the situation of spoken diglossia (Type B) has been described for Paris by Lodge (2004) on the basis of a reconstruction using various written characterisations of the vernacular, and for Lille by Pooley (2004) complemented by Hornsby’s study (2006b) of Avion, a mining town in the Pas-de-Calais with a closely related base dialect, using spoken data gathered both in a variationist perspective and by classic dialectological methods. These characteristics of dialect shift are a crucial part of the levelling process which, by its highly advanced character, seems to mark out the francophone area in relation to most of the rest of Europe (Armstrong, 2001). This levelling is sometimes referred to as convergence, although these terms imply a two-way exchange. The term Advergenz has been proposed by Mattheier (1996: 34) to describe a situation where the exchanges are predominantly one-way. Advergence typically reflects the resolution of a historically diglossic situation, the adoption of the spoken variety of the capital as the basis of a national standard (Ferguson, 1959). We adopt the term here. For our present purposes Type C and D situations are of crucial import, as they characterise the relationship of the standard to dialects in an era of post-spoken diglossia. One of the key questions is whether any parts of France, Belgium and Switzerland show marks of diaglossia and if so, which. Put another way, does it make sense to talk of regional standards in relation to francophone Europe, as it does in many others parts of the continent, such as Denmark (Pedersen, 2005), Sweden (Thelander, 1982) and the German-speaking regions (Durrell, 2007)? Moreover, are regional vernaculars used in a continuum, with base dialects still generally part of the active linguistic repertoire of the majority of the indigenous population, and still transmitted to children as the language of



10

first socialisation? In the areas where non-Romance vernaculars are or were used, the Dunkerquois, Brittany, Alsace-Lorraine and the Basque Country, does genuine diglossia persist and do local or regional varieties bear any imprint of an exoglossic substrate? The latter consideration also applies to bilingual cities such as Brussels and Biel-Bienne. Auer argues that a situation can be characterised as diaglossic even if the base dialects and traditional (exoglossic) ancestral vernaculars have fallen into disuse, provided that regional dialects enjoy vitality, with these defined as vernacular varieties of the national mainstream language. If by this definition Auer (2005: 24) can reasonably claim that many parts of England are diaglossic, then much of the literature on regional varieties of French, particularly Walter (1982) and Carton, Rossi, Autesserre and Léon (1983) would lead us to characterise France in a similar way, although the notion of regional standard would appear to apply only to the south, as indeed we claim in Chapter 4 in relation particularly to Provence. It appears at least plausible that francophone Belgium and Suisse romande, forming parts of independent nations, should have distinct national varieties, both prestige and vernacular, as is the case in the German-speaking (Durrell, 2007) and Dutch-speaking countries (Willemyns, 2007), as well as in the component nations of the UK where distinctive, readily recognisable prestige and vernacular national varieties of English are used. In contrast to England and to France, base dialects in the German-speaking countries show much greater vitality, particularly in Austria and Switzerland, where they are still the first language of a significant proportion of the population, if not its entirety in the case of Switzerland. Both Belgium and Switzerland are of course federal states where French speakers share the territory with fellow citizens who live in diglossic situations (German- and Italian-speaking Swiss and Flemish Belgians). Some of their fellow-citizens live in a situation characterised by Auer as Überschichtung or overlayering, such that their standard variety is overlaid by an exoglossic standard. This is clearly the case for the Romanche-speaking Swiss, who are bilingual or bidialectal in their L1 and German, either standard or dialectal. Italian-speaking Swiss and German-speaking Belgians are socialised into a diglossic situation in their first language but would find it difficult to manage in their homeland without knowing French, or for the former, French or German. In the case of Belgian germanophones, their territory is part of the region of Wallonia, and therefore German (used in a diglossic situation of High German and Frankish dialects) is in their communities institutionally overlaid by French. While the non-francophone parts of





Belgium and Switzerland may be characterised as diglossic or diaglossic (Rash, 1998), this is not obviously the case in Wallonia and Suisse romande. In these two regions, the base dialects, which are all typologically close to Standard French (Oïl or Francoprovençal), have, with a few notable exceptions, been largely desocialised, in some cases, particularly in the Protestant cantons of Switzerland, more radically than in the provincial Oïl areas of France. Whether French-speaking Belgium and Suisse romande can be claimed to be diaglossic is a matter of considerable debate in the sociolinguistic literature, and one which we shall address in more detail in Chapter 6. It will be useful to bear in mind that the question is generally framed in rather different terms. While Belgian scholars (in particular Francard, 1999a and Moreau, 1997) disagree on whether there is a prestige Belgian pronunciation, and Swiss scholars (particularly Thibault, 1998) take a very different approach to the concept of a national prestige norm of pronunciation (or regional within the continuous francophone space), there is general agreement (in particular by Francard, 1999 and Singy, 1996) on the greater overt prestige of the extraterritorial norm centred in France and particularly Paris, which can be said in Auer’s perspective to overlie any Belgian or Swiss norms. The centrality of Paris is a key factor both to the understanding of francophone Europe and to any argument for an exception française.

2.3 The dominance of a hypercephalic capital In this section we present two complementary models of the centrality of Paris used in the sociolinguistic literature: firstly Lodge (2004) who uses Hohenberg and Lees’ (1985) model of the history of urban Europe; and secondly the Centre-Periphery model (Reynaud, 1981) applied by Singy (1996) to the canton of Vaud in Switzerland and by Pooley (2004) to Lille. Lodge periodises his account of the development of Parisian speech into three stages: the pre-industrial phase from the 11th to the 14th centuries; the proto-industrial age from 15th to the 18th; and the industrial age in the 19th and 20th centuries. Hohenberg and Lees contrast two major types of urban system: the Network System and the Central-Place System. The Network System is particularly characteristic of the cities of northern Italy, Flanders and the Hansa in the Middle Ages. Cities evolving primarily through the Network System constitute a node in a network of urban areas linked by trade, operating as a gateway for the towns in its regional hinterland and linked to the larger network by its foreland. The growth of the city is a function of its attractive powers in commerce and exchange. In such cases – Amsterdam and Venice are cited as examples – the city is seen as creating the region,



12

rather than the opposite, stimulating production of agricultural surpluses in its surrounding areas. Within the Network System, there is neither readily definable symmetry nor shape, nor indeed constraints on linear distance. Its usefulness is tied in with trade routes, such as the river system of medieval Flanders dominated by the Meuse and the Scheldt (Escaut), which together with tributaries such as the Scarpe and the Lys link Cambrai, Tournai, Courtrai, Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp and Rotterdam. Paris, on the other hand, is a clear example of the Central-Place System, although the two systems are not mutually exclusive, since the French capital was able to develop in large measure because of its position on important trade routes and its proximity to productive agricultural areas capable of providing food for an increasing population. Hohenberg and Lees (1985: 690) describe the Central-Place system as a neat geometric mosaic of graduated centres structuring the commercial, administrative and cultural needs of a region and eventually integrating regions into a unified nation. The major central place is supported by a number of secondary central ones. Such places tend not to be random in size but to locate at even distances from one another and thus to range relatively regularly in an urban hierarchy: national capitals, provincial or regional capitals and market towns. This model, largely based on economic and demographic factors, would be expected to predict that there will be a number of major urban centres dominating their regions and acting as norm-setters in a wide range of respects including, crucially from our perspective, speech norms, whereas in reality Paris dominates virtually all aspects of national life. A greater range of factors than the notion of the Central-Place System is captured by the Centre-Periphery model devised by Reynaud (1981), the principal elements of which are shown in Table 2.2. The successful application of the model to regions in France (Lille-Métropole; Pooley, 2004) and Switzerland (Vaud; Singy, 1996) suggests strongly that it would work as fruitfully in other parts of the European francophone space. Table 2.2 Centre-Periphery model (Reynaud, 1981) (1) demographic weight (2) relatively high standard of living and production capacity (3) concentration of financial, economic, administrative, military and decision-making powers (4) infrastructure underpinning its central position (5) its visibility which favours external contacts and relations (6) cultural reach





The Centre-Periphery model is articulated on the obvious, and for the most part incontrovertible fact of inequality among divisions of geographical space at any level, be they district, town, region, country or transnational entity. These inequalities are not fundamentally spatial but economic, and thus social and human. Building on this observation of disparities among social–spatial divisions, geographers and urban historians (e.g. Braudel, 1979; Reynaud, 1981) have sought to locate what one might term the centres of inequality, or the leading economic areas, at various historical periods. Economically central places, (‘heartlands’; Hohenberg and Lees, 1995) distinguish themselves from other areas which are to varying degrees peripheral. There is considerable agreement among scholars on which areas constitute the centre. Hohenberg and Lees (1995) trace the shift of economic dominance in Europe from the Mediterranean area, mainly northern Italy in the Middle Ages, to north-western Europe in later centuries, while Braudel locates the economic centre successively in specific cities: Venice, Genoa, Antwerp, Amsterdam, London and New York. Reynaud (1981) argues that the centre may be quite diffuse, to include an area as large as the north-eastern United States comprising New York, Boston and Washington (around 400,000 km2 ). As with any French-speaking city in Europe, regional centrality must be evaluated in relation to the overridingly dominant position of Paris within the francophone heartland, since this has been cogently demonstrated by a number of sociolinguists, whether historically (Lodge, 1993) or in terms of the ‘linguistic imaginary’ for Belgium (Francard, 1993; Moreau, Brichard and Dupal, 1999) and Switzerland (Singy, 1996). The work of Singy (1996) specifically shows how a non-central or peripheral area outside French national territory, the Vaud, a canton of Frenchspeaking Switzerland, can be investigated using the Centre-Periphery model, demonstrating firstly the dominance of France and particularly Paris, and secondly, the regional dominance of the large cities, particularly Geneva within francophone Switzerland and Lausanne within the Vaud. This model is more problematic with regard to francophone Belgium, divided as it is between Brussels and Wallonia. Brussels undoubtedly enjoys a degree of prestige (Pohl, 1962) and middle-class Bruxellois appear to enjoy relative linguistic security (Garsou, 1991). The traditional vernaculars of the capital, however, with their obvious Flemish influence, never constituted a target variety for other francophones as did the Parisian vernacular. Historically, no urban area in Wallonia seemed to diffuse either overt or covert prestige beyond regional limits.



14


While the centre can be characterised in terms of the factors summarised in Table 2.2, the periphery is depicted by its lack of sources of power, capable of varying in degrees linked to the balance of the volume of exchanges between the centre and periphery. At one extreme, there may be no or very few such exchanges, in which case Reynaud (1981) evokes the notion of ‘isolate’, a term reserved only for the most remote areas like Amazonia. With regard to francophone Europe, the terms of ‘trade’ may at the other extreme be highly asymmetrical in favour of the centre, or more or less even or symmetrical, with every intermediate degree imaginable. The term ‘centre’ is not intended to be read in purely geometrical terms since, to take two perhaps obvious examples, Paris and London are clearly positionally off-centre in relation to the whole of their respective countries. By taking account of the diachronic dimension, the model becomes dynamic and capable of accounting for the changing fortunes of centres and their peripheries, the emergence of new centres and the decline of older ones. As the list of properties of the centres suggests, all kinds of flows are potentially relevant, whether of trade, capital, people, goods or information. The demographic dominance of Paris in French life is difficult to exaggerate (see Table 2.3). Since its prodigious growth in the Middle Ages, it Table 2.3 Populations of francophone cities and areas City

Population

Paris Brussels (Hal-Vilvorde) Lyon Marseille–Aix-en-Provence Lille Brussels (19 communes) Toulouse Bordeaux Nantes Liège Strasbourg Rennes Rouen Montpellier Geneva Charleroi

10,562,000 2,500,000 1,598,000 1,398,000 1,108,000 1,031,000 917,000 882,000 674,000 594,000 557,000 483,000 470,000 446,000 470,000 422,000

Source: INSEE, 2000: 7; Office fédéral de la Statistique, 2000.



2.4 Describing the centre


has remained one of the three most populous cities in Europe and demographically is by far the largest francophone city. Figures cited (Chandler and Fox, 1974: 11–20) show it to have been more than two-and-a-half times bigger than any other European city in 1400 (275,000 inhabitants) and with four times more residents than the second French city, Rouen. Even after decades of decentralisation, the Paris region is home to around 18% of the total population of France and even conservative estimates of the population of the region, compared to geographically broad-based calculations of those of other larger urban regions, show that it is the equivalent of the ten next biggest French cities (Damette, 1997: 168). According to the demarcational criteria used in the 1999 census, Paris still had 17% of the population and the total demographic weight of the next 17 biggest cities in France. The combined population of francophone Belgium (4.5m) and Suisse romande (1.2m) just about exceeds half the population of the Paris region. While the population of a putative ‘Greater Brussels’ (corresponding to the electoral area of Bruxelles-Hal-Vilvorde) has a population of 2.5m, this entity is the result of the much resented spread of francophones from BruxellesCapitale encroaching on the surrounding areas of Flanders. Far from being a unified francophone space, it is one of the prime flashpoints in the political crisis that erupted in 2007 and continued throughout 2008. As for Suisse romande, although its total population barely exceeds that of Lille, significantly, 65% live in two urban areas: Geneva (470,000) and Lausanne (309,000); see Table 3.12. In addition to this demographic dominance, the economic power of France in GDP dwarfs that of Belgium and Switzerland overall, although not if measured on a per-capita basis (Table 2.4). Given the dominance of Paris over the national economy of France (about a quarter of total output; INSEE, 2000: 29), the productive capacity of Paris is not far short of the combined GDPs of Belgium and Switzerland, and far outstrips the contribution of the francophone regions of those countries. Within France the dominance of Paris in productivity is even greater than its demographic dominance would suggest, providing nearly a quarter of all jobs. It is not only the leading industrial city, with around 26% of national capacity, but also the leading service-sector employer with a clear lead in higher-value tertiary posts (sometimes called quartenary; Paris and Stevens, 2000: 94). Average salaries are at least 15% higher than any other city in France and unemployment among under-25s is among the lowest (INSEE, 2000: 29).



16


France

Belgium

Switzerland

Population 2000 GDP Per head

58.7 million $1,464.9 bn $24,956

10.2 million $262.8 bn $25,670

7.26 million $262.6 bn $36,166

Population 2004 GDP Per head

60.4 million $1,911 bn $31,640

10.3 million $317 bn $30,810

7.3 million $323 bn $43,930

Population 2008 GDP

61.4 million $2.68trn (PPP: $2.17 trn)

10.4 million $465bn (PPP; $394 bn)

7.6 million $424bn (PPP: $306 bn)

Per head

$43,640 (PPP: $35,430)

$44,730 (PPP: $37,890)

$55,780 (PPP: $40,260)

Source: The Economist, 1999, 2003, 2007.

The historical domination by Paris of the French financial, political and administrative systems is sufficiently well known for phrases such as Paris-Province to evoke it in the minds of most French citizens. For Hohenberg and Lees (1995) it is a primate city, sucking in the wealth and talent of the whole country and causing what Gravier (1957) called ‘desertification’, so one-sided are the flows between centre and periphery. It is arguable that even the attempts over recent decades to remedy this situation through the promotion of provincial centres not only depended but still depends on the decision-making role of Paris, notably in the creation of new towns and métropoles d’équilibre. To take the example of Lille, the decision was taken centrally to develop a métropole by creating Villeneuve d’Ascq, a new town to the east of the city centre. It also coincided with the decline of the traditional industries of the region (textiles, mining and steel), which weakened the position of the next two largest towns of the region, Roubaix and Tourcoing, now considered for a number of purposes as part of Lille. The way in which the traditional domestic infrastructure of the road and rail systems reinforced the pivotal role of Paris has long and often been quoted as a classic exemplar of centralisation. It has now admittedly been attentuated in some measure by new motorways and high-speed train links allowing travel between many provincial centres without the traditional route through the national capital. The prestige of Paris as an international destination is unarguably greater than that



Table 2.4 Comparative GDP of France, Belgium and Switzerland with purchasing power parity (PPP) in the 21st century


of any other part of the country. The city’s cultural reach traditionally made extended sojourns an unavoidable stage in the career of any aspiring scientist or artist, not to mention many civil servants and business executives. Its role in the modern audiovisual media and film industry is again dominant. The French capital has 50% of all jobs in the culture and leisure sectors (INSEE, 2000: 16). This dominance, as Singy argues (1996: 30), has far-reaching linguistic consequences, for the ‘centrality’ of Paris confers upon it a virtual monopoly on linguistic innovation, not merely in France, but in the whole of francophone Europe. Two manifestations of this cultural prestige which may be cited as particularly telling are serious literature and television programmes. On the latter point, the direction of ‘traffic’ in the number of programmes produced in France shown on Belgian and Swiss channels, compared to those produced in Belgium and Switzerland and shown in France, is an archetypal example of the disparity of flow between centre and periphery, since during the 1990s almost two-thirds of French-language programmes shown in Suisse romande were ‘imported’ (cf. Section 3.9). The demonstration of their national or regional loyalties by Belgian and Swiss authors has proved difficult to reconcile with reaching a wider audience (Gorceix, 1997). Almost inevitably, the attempt means acceptance by a Parisian publishing house. Cultural and linguistic success comes at the price either of allowing oneself to be subsumed into the canon of French literature (for the most distinguished) or aiming at a form of universalism wider than francophone. Aspirations to universalism inevitably erase characteristic local lexis and syntax, without necessarily attaining something greater than the francocentric. In the words of Robert Frickx (1997), Belgium and Switzerland are ‘provinces culturelles françaises’. The study by Jérôme Meizoz (1996), rather provocatively entitled ‘Le droit de “mal écrire”’, argues that francophone writers, whether Swiss, Belgian, Quebecker, African or Caribbean, need to fight to assert their linguistic identity and authentic means of self-expression in French in a literary world traditionally tilted towards Paris. Attempts to ‘mal écrire’, or to write according to distinctive Swiss (or Belgian) norms, generally lead to two possible results: assimilation or marginalisation. An example of the former is Corinna Bille (1912–1979), winner of the 1975 Prix Goncourt, who was reported to have been discreetly taken aside to have her ‘suissismes’ corrected. The alternative is to go the way of Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz (1878–1947), who spent twelve years in Paris, but characterised Vaudois speech in literary dialogues, although significantly not in narrative, where he was scrupulous in his use of Standard French. Comparable remarks may be



18

made about perhaps the most famous of all Swiss writers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), who used the epistolary genre to evoke to some degree local (Genevan) usage in La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761). Although Rousseau thought of himself as ‘Suisse de nation’ (Jost, 1962: 14), he generally referred to himself as a citizen of Geneva, spoke all his life with a Genevan accent and could by no criterion be said to have wished to promote norms alternative to a Parisian model. Likewise, francophone Belgian writers are assimilated or marginalised, this latter aspect reflected in their prominence in genre fiction like short stories, comic strips and thrillers. While Brussels is clearly a centre of international exchange on many cultural levels, its local identity has shifted significantly over the course of the existence of the Belgian state. Between 1830 and the eve of World War I, the balance of ethnolinguistic affiliation shifted from a strong Flemish-speaking majority (70%–30%) to a francophone majority (Table 2.5). By the turn of the 21st century (Janssens, 2008: 4), 95% of Brussels residents were able to speak French well or perfectly, compared to 28% for Dutch, which by 2006 had been overtaken by English according to the criteria chosen (see Table 2.8). In the national context, it is difficult to argue the existence of a unified francophone Belgian identity, since Bruxellois tend to see themselves as different from both their Walloon and Flemish compatriots. A telling example is seen in voting patterns, as Bruxellois, Flemings and Walloons have consistently voted for different political parties, which are in any case set up along rigid regional lines that are, to say the least, surprising in a modern democratic state. Even the expression of a common Walloon identity is problematical as regards ‘high culture’, although there is an undeniable vitality of folkloristic manifestations; one can argue that cultural products like these have a wide appeal for an audience highly aware of the continuing desocialisation of traditional vernaculars. Table 2.5 French and Dutch speakers in 19th-century Brussels French-speaking

Dutch-speaking

30% 39% 50+%

70% 57% , although never pronounced in Standard French, is explanatorily useful because its presence is held as blocking nasalisation (cf. plan-plane). The first <e> in la semaine is pronounced variably, as in [las@mEnlasmEn]. Indeed, variationist studies (Armstrong, 1993; Hansen, 2000; see Tables 4.7 and 4.8) have shown it to be a strong majority form lending weight to the contention that in the phrase-medial context VC_CV, the most favourable to deletion (as in la semaine or dans le bureau), zero is the base form leaving the possibility of variable insertion of mute-e. The subjects in the Dieuze study (Table 4.7) are secondary-school pupils from the median classes, with boys and girls in two age bands as indicated, recorded in group conversations (in the absence of the investigator) and interviews with the researcher. Both social and stylistic variation is rather limited, with no obvious overall patterning and only small degrees of style shift. We can infer either that the speaker sample Table 4.7 Total numbers (N) and percentage insertion rates (%) for mute-e in the context: VC_CV, e.g. in la semaine in Dieuze (Armstrong, 1993) Sex / Age

Interview

Conversation

N

%

N

%

M 16–19 F 16–19 M 11–12 F 11–12

120 120 120 120

30.0 11.7 24.2 25.8

120 120 120 120

9.2 15.6 16.7 20.8

All groups

480

22.9

480

15.6

Table 4.8 Mute-e insertion in monosyllabic words in (V)C_C(V) as in: c’est dans le bureau (Hansen, 2000) Class / Age

Interview (N)

%

Reading passage (N)

%

MC Young MC Adult ALL MC 1989

1204 606 1810

27.7 41.1 32.2

787 403 1190

78.9 23.9 77.3

WC Young WC Adult ALL WC 1992

281 347 628

28.1 31.4 29.9

242 243 485

87.6 87.4 87.5



Accents and Levelling in France, Belgium and Switzerland 117

displays a limited range of communicative competence, or perhaps more plausibly that the stylistic range elicited is restricted because the influence of writing was not directly present in either speech style. Regarding the latter point, the comparison with Hansen’s result is very direct. Hansen’s Paris study (Table 4.8) compares scripted and unscripted styles, with striking results. Two speaker groups were sampled: one middle-class (‘cultivés’) with graduate-level education; and one workingclass (‘défavorisés’) having education lower than the Baccalauréat. The results concern variable deletion of mute-e in monosyllabic words preceded by a single consonant, another context that is favourable to deletion. Thus c’est dans le bureau can be realised: [sed A ˜ l@byKo] or, much more commonly (p, whereas this is not necessarily the case for schwa-tagging, which may be intrusive, as in



Context

bonjour [bÕZuö@]. Finding no examples of an intrusively realised schwa, Armstrong and Unsworth hypothesised that their informants may be shifting towards a more conservative form of the supralocal variety. PFC-inspired studies confirm the consistent realisation of four distinct qualities of nasal vowels in Salles-Curan (Aveyron), Saint-Jean-Pied-dePort (Basque Country) and Douzens (Aude). In all three locations, / A ˜/ is generally fronted towards /ã/, and in Douzens /˜ E/ is raised towards [˜e] (Durand and Tarrier, 2003). The bilabial and dental/alveolar consonantal elements, as in pain [pEE˜m ] or mettons [metOO ˜ n ], noted by Carton et al. for the exemplar selected for the Languedoc from Gaillac (Tarn), appear to have been regionally levelled in favour of a velar, as noted by Meisenburg (2003) in Lacaune in the same département and in Douzens (Durand and Tarrier, 2003) and Rodez and Salles-Curan (Pustka, 2007). Taylor (1996) presents a detailed analysis of Aix-en-Provence nasal vowels, focusing on degree of nasalisation and the presence and character of the nasal appendage. Table 5.19 shows that canonical nasals in the very broadest regional accents may occur without nasalisation or any consonantal element at all. Marked regional accents are or were characterised by oral vowel + full nasal consonant sequences, while nasals in what Taylor calls the regional standard generally have a weaker consonantal element, often a consonantal appendage, with possibly a degree of vowel nasalisation. Indeed, a fully nasalised vowel followed by a slight offglide, she claims, is more highly regarded than the fully nasalised (‘pointu’) vowel of standard varieties. The broadest regional forms are again used mainly by the least well-educated speakers, and those in manual occupations. Subjects educated to Baccalauréat level might use regional standard forms, and those with higher qualifications tend towards supralocal norms. The most adverged forms were associated with business executives having the most contacts outside the region, particularly with Paris. Older speakers (born 1905–1920) tended to use the broader regional features the most, while use of the velar nasal emerged as a strongly masculine feature. Other regional identities (e.g. Provençal, pays d’Aix, the traditional maritime variety of Marseille), although sensitive to gender differences, also correlated with the broader regional varieties.

Table 5.19

Nasal vowel realisations in Aix-en-Provence (Taylor, 1996: 88)

Broadest regional VN ,

V ff or VN

Regional VN ,

N

VN or V

Regional standard

Supra-local

Ñ VV

˜ V



Levelling of Regional Varieties in France 197

The nasal vowels are given a different treatment by Pickles (2001), whose analysis focusses on two parameters: presence or absence of a non-nasalised vowel followed by a nasal consonant and ‘nasal-vowel modification’, particularly the realisation of / A ˜ / as [˜ E], as in [peöpinj˜E] Perpignan. His data suggest that the vowels occurring most frequently in the corpus are most likely to be realised by localised V+N sequences. The modified nasal, however, proved to be a highly marginal variant with a mean of 3% for both locals and Maghrebians and a range of 0%–8%. Regrettably, given that the two regional variants discussed do not cover anything like the majority of cases, the study does not make it entirely clear which forms the school pupils used most of the time. With regard to oral vowels, four of the shibboleth minimal pairs of the prescriptive norm are generally not realised (e.g. Durand and Tarrier, 2003: 119): /a/ is generally front, /e/ generally high, /œ/ generally high and /O/ generally low. Several researchers (Taylor, 1996; Meisenburg, 2003; Durand and Tarrier, 2003; and Aurnague and Durand, 2003) note the pertinence of the loi de position, although the phonetic difference between the vowels is less marked than in supralocal French, and a number of exceptions have been noted. The most problematic context is what Taylor calls ‘pseudo-closed’ syllables, those which would be closed in supralocal French but in southern varieties are followed by a syllable whose nucleus is mute-e, as in mère, belle. For this context Taylor tentatively claims variability. Durand and Tarrier (2003: 119) suggest that the realisation of schwa may cause syllables of this type to behave as if closed, as in fête [fEt@], paume [pOm@], jeûne [Zœn@] and bêtement [bEt@mã]. Taylor’s findings (1996: 103ff.) regarding the variable phonetic characteristics of the front and back mid vowels /e/-/E/ and /o/-/O/ according to socio-regional variety are shown in Tables 5.20 and 5.21. For the E archiphoneme, the broadest regional accents are characterised by close variants (which may be as close as [e fl]) which many speakers use categorically. A slightly more open variant, which Taylor calls ‘emphatic’, as in c’est vrai! [sevKfl e], occurs in varieties classed as Table 5.20 Realisations of /e/-/E/ in Aix-en-Provence (Taylor, 1996: 105–11) Broadest regional

Regional

Regional standard

Supralocal

Word-final open syllables, e.g. lait, chantais [e fl] or [e]

[e] or [e fl]

[e], [e fl] or [E]

[e] or [E]

Word-final closed syllables, e.g. mer, sel [e]

[e], [e fl] or [E]

[e fl] or [E]

[E]



198 Social and Linguistic Change in European French

Levelling of Regional Varieties in France 199 Realisations of /o/-/O/ in aube, robe in Aix-en-Provence (Taylor,

Broadest regional

Regional

Hyper-corrective Regional Standard

Supralocal

/6/

/6/-/O/

/6/-/o/

/o/-/O/

[6b@] [K6b@] [6b@] [K6b@] [6b(@)] [K6b(@)]

/o fl/-/O/

[o flb(@)][K6b(@)] [ob(@)][KOb](@)]

regional, if not of the broadest type. Variable use of [E], on the other hand, occurs only in the most standardised forms. In non-final closed and open syllables, Taylor (1996: 68) speaks of ‘free variation’, although certain sub-sets, e.g. items containing the clusters /ks/ and /gz/ like excuse and exemple were consistently pronounced with close variants. In word-final closed syllables, the raised variant [e fi] does occur and open variants are variable in regionally marked accents. For back-mid vowels in non-final open syllables, [o] is clearly the dominant form (Taylor, 1996: 72–3), but some influence of the supralocal variety can be seen, since items which have /o/, such as beauté, are realised with a greater proportion of close variants overall (89.6%) than items like botter which has /O/ in mainstream varieties (75.5%). In word-final closed (and pseudoclosed) syllables, open realisations of [O] or closer ([6]) were used in 90% of cases overall in contexts where /O/ would occur in standard varieties, e.g. robe. In items where standardised varieties have [o], such as aube, 81.3% of realisations were more open than standard /o/. The most marked regional variant, [6], is used across a considerable part of the community in the aube set, but only in the broadest regional accents in the robe set. In the more standardised varieties, the distribution of the variants is comparable to that of standardised varieties, although the close variant is variably lowered somewhat [o fl] in relation to such varieties. Curiously, Taylor’s data point to hypercorrections in the robe [Kob(@)] but not in the aube set. In items containing syllables closed by /z/ like chose, in which only the close variant occurs in standardised varieties, the main variants were [S6z(@)] (56%) and [SOz(@)] (34%), and again the broadest regional variants were associated with males, manual workers and Provençal speakers. The hypercorrect forms mostly correlated with claims of a town identity, and the usage of women. The consonantal features identified as southern by Martinet (1945) do not figure very prominently in recent sociolinguistic work, often meriting only cursory mention. Word-final consonant devoicing was observed in a minority of cases among a group of middle-class



Table 5.21 1996: 76)

informants from Bordeaux (Temple, 2001: 157–8). Apical /r/ was consistently used only by the oldest speakers in Douzens (Durand and Tarrier, 2003), Salles-Curan (Pustka, 2007) and Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port (Aurnague and Durand, 2003), with middle-aged and younger speakers using only uvular variants. A strongly fricative variant of /r/ is noted in Perpignan (Pickles, 2001) This variant is shown to be a strong minority feature, with ‘locals’ showing 0% to 18% usage and the heaviest user, a Maghrebian, scoring 42%. Use of the palatal nasal /ñ/ is also losing ground to the sequence [nj], e.g. in Douzens (Durand and Tarrier, 2003), although its (possibly imminent) demise may simply parallel a change that has occurred in supralocal French. Diaeresis in items like nier and lion are noted in PFC studies, particularly in the speech of the oldest informants, in Lacaune (Lonnemann and Meisenburg, 2006), Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port (Aurnague and Durand, 2003) and Douzens (Durand and Tarrier, 2003). The glottal fricative /h/ is much rarer, with only a single occurrence from the oldest informant from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port in a reading passage, in the item le hasard [løhazar]. The lateral fricative, noted in Carton et al. (1983) and Walter (1982), but not by Martinet, occurs in the usage of three (older) subjects in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port (Aurnague and Durand, 2003) in both reading and conversational styles, distinguishing pairs like étriller [etriLe] and étrier [etrije]. Unsurprisingly, the younger generations of this family do not use it. Unlike other regions of France, accents evoking the south are less stigmatised than those perceived as typical of other regions. Indeed, attenuated middle-class accents may be more highly rated than mainstream varieties (Taylor, 1996), and even those typical of perhaps the median classes are not automatically regarded as despised social dialects (Blanchet and Armstrong, 2006). That should not, however, be taken to imply all absence of stigmatisation. In Chauvin’s (1985) evaluative study, based on the judgements of local teachers on speech recordings of 11- and 12-year-old pupils in Martigues and Fos-sur-Mer, for example, pupils of Provençal origin received lower scores and were judged more negatively by locally born judges than their incomer classmates. Moreover, these ratings were matched by parallel negative ratings on two character traits: diligence and intelligence, on the basis of which the locally born pupils were less highly rated than their peers and more severely judged by teachers of local origin. Perceptions of ‘localness’ correlated strongly with word-final schwa, which also proved to be a highly sensitive social-class marker. Among middle-class




pupils Chauvin observed some shift towards supralocal schwa-deleting norms, whereas outsider working-class students shifted towards local norms through increased retention. Kuiper (2005) reports on a study in perceptual dialectology in which Parisian and Provence informants were asked to rate regional accents according to various criteria. For both Paris and Provence judges, Parisian French rated most highly for correctness, whereas the Provence accent was rated only 20th by the Parisians and 17th out of 24 by the judges from Provence. The other southern accents (Languedoc, Rhône-Alpes, Gascony) were by and large rated in the middle ranks (11th–17th by the Provençals and 8th–16th by the Parisians), below those of the northern regions (Centre, Touraine, Champagne, Burgundy, Normandy) but above those of eastern France and Belgium and Switzerland. With respect to pleasantness, on the other hand, the southern accents filled the top four places for the Provençal judges and were rated by the Parisians between first and 9th. Of all the regional accents, that of Marseille/Provence was the one of which Paris respondents believed they were most aware, and proved to be the one that the greatest number were prepared to imitate, or attempt to. This stereotypical otherness of Marseille speech finds support in much anecdotal evidence. Skimming French joke books by, for instance, Coluche (2000) and Jean Roucasse (1996), it is clear that the Marseillais is by far the most common regional stereotype, as proved to be the case for studies in perceptual dialectology carried out in Lille (Pooley, 2004), where the ‘accent de Marseille’ was mentioned by several informants, even when being questioned about varieties of Picard! High levels of migration to the south are no doubt an important factor in promoting levelling, but it may also be true that locally born young people are also converging towards supralocal norms. Wanner’s (1993) study of two small villages in the traditionally Catalan-speaking (Salses, Pyrénées-Orientales) and Occitan-speaking areas (Sigean, Aude) is highly suggestive in this respect. In response to the question: ‘Le français tel qu’on le parle dans le Languedoc-Roussillon est-il différent du français parlé à Paris?’, the highest proportion of positive responses came from the oldest respondents. This corresponds to their own linguistic practices, for in Wanner’s words (1993: 81) ‘Déjà les jeunes parlent souvent un français parisien presque parfait’. Kuiper (2005: 46) offers similar observations for his younger Provençal informants. These testimonies suggest strongly that among the generations born in the 1980s convergence towards supralocal norms has moved on apace, with middle-class and more highly educated young adults leading the way.





What we have called the Dominant Southern Pattern (DSP) shows considerable vitality, although there are many indications that it is starting to recede, as younger and better educated speakers increasingly converge towards supralocal norms. This tendency is further promoted by many northerners moving south and showing little inclination to adopt southern norms, particularly in the middle or higher strata of society. However, it may be that working-class youngsters are more likely to be assimilated to the DSP (Chauvin, 1985), although new large-scale industries attracting large numbers of people from other parts of France are rare. The DSP concerns only vocalic features, with the possible exception of the velar nasal element in nasal vowels, and southern consonantal traits are heard only in the speech of the elderly, mostly living in small villages. Linguists have made much of the southern oral-vowel distribution, and the truism that most speakers conform variably to the loi de position, with close variants in greater favour than in mainstream varieties, is very largely borne out by the evidence. Some traditional varieties, like the Marseille speech described by Brun (1931) and exemplified by the Provence speaker in Carton et al. (1983), continue to show a degree of divergence, but the vitality of the pagnolesque ‘real Marseillais’ features (Binisti and Gasquet-Cyrus, 2003) is hardly confirmed even by a study now three-quarters of a century old. Indeed, Brun noted a considerable degree of continuing convergence towards the supralocal variety, an observation that can only be reinforced by more recent evidence. The dominant nasal-vowel variants seem to be slightly more weakly nasalised than is usual in supralocal French, possibly with a slight nasal off-glide, which is generally velar even in rural areas, where bilabial and dental variants were noted a few decades earlier. Southerners still pronounce more schwas than their counterparts in the rest of the country, although they are doing so to a lesser degree than in the past, with median or middle-class, younger and female speakers leading the change. While some scholars have hinted at sub-regional differences in the pronunciation of schwa, such detailed indications as are available, like Taylor (1996), suggest that local variants are indicative only of the broadest accents. It should be borne in mind that the realisation of schwa as a rounded central mid vowel [œ] or [ø] may well be a feature shared by most varieties of French. Martinet’s (1945) study of middle-class men born between 1880 and 1920 showed that at that time many southerners perceived their speech



5.13 Summary of the situation in southern France

to be closer to the prescriptive norm than the DSP on many points, like the /a/-/A/ distinction (31% or 44%) and realisation of nasal vowels without nasal consonant (42%). Perceived deletion rates for schwa were low, but the study showed variability. In contrast to this considerably converged vowel system, Martinet’s informants professed high use of regional consonant variants: apical and geminate /r/ (46%) and diaeresis in words with standard yod (72%), which recent studies have shown to be relic features. It is tempting to draw a parallel with what has occurred in northern England over the past few decades. Supralocal consonantal features like th-fronting have spread to the whole of England (Britain, 2005) while generalised northern vocalic features are displacing more localised variants (Watt and Milroy, 1999). If convergence towards supralocal norms affects consonants first, as Séguy’s (1951) description of Toulouse speech already suggested more than half a century ago, the dominance of the DSP in the middle decades of the 20th century (Séguy, 1951; Walter, 1982) would point to the equally plausible inference that broad regional norms (southern French, northern English) had emerged in the vowel system, such that speakers may be recognisably southern but not recognisably Provençal, Gascon or Languedocien for most outsiders (Woehrling and Boula de Mareüil, 2006). This is in line with one aspect of the levelling hypothesis we have been examining here.

Notes 1. There is, however, little recent documented evidence for this. Martinet (1945) did not designate a separate area for Alsace as different from eastern France more broadly understood. 2. The importance of the military garrison, which brings in residents from all parts of France, may mean that it is somewhat atypical. 3. The historical preponderance of perceptual studies unsubstantiated by behavioural data in French sociolinguistics, although now partly redressed, is nonetheless regrettable. 4. Brevet d’Etudes du Premier Cycle. Examination taken at the end of the collège, around the age of fifteen. 5. The success of the film Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis (2008) has made imitating a Ch’ti accent fashionable but only in jest. 6. Gardner-Chloros (1991) quotes unpublished work by Bicker-Kaufmann. There is, as yet, no published analysis of PFC data from Strasbourg, Mulhouse and Boersch (www.projet-pfc.net). 7. These years of birth assume the latest possible date, i.e. 1968, given that the fieldwork was carried out between 1965 and 1968. 8. There is, as yet, no published analysis of the PFC data from Clermont-Ferrand. 9. A UK English example is the use of the standard vowel of door /O:/ in items which usually take the vowel of got /6/ e.g. off, Austria, Australia,




characteristic both of highly conservative RP (the speech of Queen Elizabeth II) and broad Cockney (represented by the Alf Garnett stereotype). 10. The only exception is Walter’s informant from the Hautes-Alpes, who used it in only 38% of possible cases in word-final position (Pooley, 2007: 44). 11. In contrast to northern French, we assume the base form of southern French to include mute-e. 12. Elissa Pustka née Sobotta. These two studies are therefore by the same person.




Regional Vernacular Varieties and Language Levelling in Belgium and Switzerland

6.1 Overview In this chapter we discuss the evolution of vernacular varieties in francophone Belgium and Suisse romande since the 1960s and 1970s. As both territories are administratively federal with different substrate varieties, we propose a presentation based on broad regional divisions. This procedure exposes rather starkly that the available evidence has variable value, whether of fieldwork methodology, recency or geographical coverage. For Belgium, separate sections are devoted to the major territorial divisions of Brussels (with its traditional sociolinguistic divisions) and Wallonia, which can be sub-divided according to either the distribution of the traditional endogenous varieties or more recent perceptual accounts. For Switzerland, the fullest accounts (in geographical coverage) are based on perceptual studies carried out in the 1970s and 1980s, while more recent studies (perceptual and phonological) are heavily concentrated on one canton, the Vaud.

6.2 Brussels vernacular Apart from Hambye’s (2005) discussion of a single sociolinguistic variable, the realisation of /r/, our account of Brussels vernacular is based on what one can call the classic descriptions of Baetens-Beardsmore (1971, 1979), Walter (1982) and Francard (1989a). According to BaetensBeardsmore (1979: 227), the sociolinguistic profile of Belgian nationals in Brussels in the 1960s can be characterised in terms of bilingualism and diglossia (see Table 6.1). Baetens-Beardsmore notes four categories of monolinguals and two of bilinguals. Firstly, well-educated (cultivé) or middle- or upper-class 205



6

206 Social and Linguistic Change in European French Table 6.1 Sociolinguistic profile of Belgian nationals in Brussels in the mid-20th century

1. Educated, Brussels-born francophone monolingual 2. Working-class Brussels-born francophone monolingual 3. Brussels-born bilingual

Diglossia

Bilingualism

− (+)

−

+

+

4. Working-class Brussels-born Flemish monolingual

−

−

5. Flemish in-migrant

+

+

6. Walloon in-migrant

(+)

−

French speakers (Row 1 of Table 6.1), (as exemplified by the usage of JMB (Walter, 1982, discussed in Section 4.8), many of whom traditionally did not learn Flemish, and whose French differs in only minor ways from the supralocal variety; secondly, working-class French monolinguals (Row 2) who speak a marked local form of French, but may be able to switch to a more standard variety (hence the parenthetic + in the diglossia column). Walloon migrants who spoke their local endogenous variety were not considered bilingual – although they might well be today – but were deemed to make active use of H and L varieties in a diglossic situation. Monolingual French speakers who were in constant contact with working-class bilinguals might well use features prompted by language contact while retaining a recognisably native variety free of interference phenomena (Baetens-Beardsmore, 1979: 228). Row 4 lists working-class monolingual Flemish speakers who use mainly, if not exclusively dialectal Flemish, rarely using an H variety of Netherlandic. At the time of the fieldwork (1964–67), this group was ageing and in numerical decline. Neither Flemish nor Walloon migrants (Rows 5 and 6), nor indeed the certainly considerable number of commuters from Flanders and Wallonia, were perceived to exert a decisive innovative influence. All three accounts (Baetens-Beardsmore, 1971, 1979; Walter, 1982; Francard, 1989) focus on Category 3, Flemish L1 bilinguals (Brussels Brabançon variety) who readily code-mix and frequently code-switch. Baetens-Beardsmore also notes (1971: 58) the wide variety of pronunciation features in the speech of working-class bilinguals, ranging from relatively neutral accents to those bearing strong marks of Flemish influence. It is however these latter which are either described or exemplified in the



Category

studies under review here and which also form the basis of the so-called Belgian accent reflected in the perception and mimicking of other francophones. By the time of Baetens-Beardsmore’s fieldwork, in contrast to migrants from Flanders, who maintained H and L varieties, speakers were observed to be abandoning the local Brabant dialect in favour either of a more standard variety of southern Netherlandic or French (BaetensBeardsmore, 1979: 242). In the 1950s Vekemans (1963: 6) had already observed language shift taking place, older people possessing the local variety of Flemish actively and younger people only passively, having French as their L1. Most of them, however, learned standard Dutch at school and spoke it rather haltingly while showing influences of the local Brabançon variety. Most Belgians are aware too of a mixed urban variety called Marollien, named after Marolles, one of the older working-class quarters of Brussels. The mythology surrounding this archetypal working-class variety was still showing sufficient vitality for Pohl (1953) to list its linguistic features and for Baetens-Beardsmore (1971: 53; 1979: 230) to discuss it, although he found no difference between the local French of Marolles and other areas of the city, while many of the features listed by Pohl are not exclusive even to a putative basilectal Marollien. Hennig (1926: 38) states that the variety had died out before 1914 and the fact that popular works of dialectology were being written in the mid-19th century by authors with comic pseudonyms such as Coco Lulu (Lefèvre, 1862), is highly suggestive of a variety already in decline and hence becoming stereotyped. One of Vekemans’ informants called this variety Bargoensch (derived from ‘baragouin’), seemingly in its origins the Dutch equivalent of the Parisian slang used by the criminal fraternity, with however most long-surviving words passing into more general usage, like tof ‘chic, beau, épatant’ and maf ‘fou, cinglé’. This implies the variety is not exclusive to Brussels or even Belgium. Flemish influence is readily audible in traditional L2 vernacular Belgian French in the realisation of the vowels, which in general are more open and lax than in Reference French. There is also clear influence of the stress timing of Netherlandic, causing vowels in stressed position to be lengthened or diphthongised and in unstressed position to be weakened to schwa or elided altogether (Table 6.2, drawing on Baetens-Beardsmore, 1971: 77; 1979: 234). The descriptions of Walter and Francard based on data gathered some fifteen to twenty years later (Tables 6.3 and 6.4) still show considerable Flemish influence, but in



Regional Varieties & Levelling: Belgium and Switzerland 207


Front unrounded

Front rounded

Back

I/Ij

Y

U

øj

fiO

e/e

j

E/E

j

A/6

æ

Table 6.3 Oral vowels in open stressed syllables by working-class Brussels speaker (born 1896) of Flemish background (Walter, 1982) Front unrounded

Front rounded

Back

i:/I

y:/y

u:/U

j

e /e

E

ø

ou

O˛ a:

a

Table 6.4 Oral vowels in unstressed and closed syllables by working-class Brussels speaker (born 1896) of Flemish background (Walter, 1982) Front unrounded

Front rounded

Back

i: or ij /I

y

u:/U

e˛ or E

a

ø

ou

O a or a:

the later corpora the relative absence of vowel gradation (weakening to schwa), may with due caution be construed as pointing to convergence towards more widely distributed varieties. The following is a synthesis of marked Brussels vernacular as characterised by Baetens-Beardsmore, Walter and Francard. BaetensBeardsmore’s informants were of mature age in the 1960s and thus



Table 6.2 Realisation of vowels in stressed position among working-class Brussels bilinguals in the 1960s (Baetens-Beardsmore, 1971: 76)

closely contemporary with VD (Walter) a woman born in 1896 (aged 80 at the time of the interview), a semi-skilled manual worker’s daughter who had worked as an embroiderer and later as a cleaner at Brussels city hall. Both her parents spoke Flemish, and she frequently switched codes. Francard’s (1989a) exemplar, named Eugène, can be assumed also to be from a modest background and to have been born a generation or so later (between 1915 and 1920). In their usage all three front vowels /i/, /e/ and /E/ tended to be lax in non-final stressed syllables and diphthongised or lengthened in word-final open syllables. High front /i/ was variably realised by the lax, slightly centralised vowel [I]. In certain lexical items, particularly those with , the vowel was variably lengthened, as in vie [vI:], and diphthongised in open final syllables, as in Paris [pAöIj ]. In unstressed syllables as in publicité, Baetens-Beardsmore, like Warnant (1997), noted vowel gradation and cases of variable elision typical of stress-timed languages, yielding [pYblIs(@)tej ]. The lax realisation of /e/ caused it also to be more open, roughly half-way between /e/ and /E/. In word-final position diphthongisation was frequent, as in elles sont fâchées [El sÕ fASej ], année [anej ] and [pej ] (Brussels vernacular for ‘bloke’). Weakening of open /e/ to schwa or elision were frequent, as in [b@tI;z] bêtise or [söYö] serrure. A raised variant was observed in non-final syllables of polysyllabic items, as in procession [pöfi OsesjÕ]. Diphthongisation was variable in word-final open syllables, as in la craie [lA krEj ], as was nasalisation before /n/, as in semaine [sm˜ E;n]. For open /e/, Eugène’s usage again differed from that of the other two accounts, as he used a long variant of /E/, as in [bE:t] bête. In many contexts the distinction between /a/ and /A/ was variably neutralised, as in lame and l’âme. For VD and Eugène, the contrast was realised by length rather than quality and was variably neutralised through an intermediate realisation. In certain specifiable contexts, e.g. before /r/, /a/ was variably raised to [æ] as in tard [tæö] and raised and rounded to [6] before postvocalic /l/, which was generally velarised, as in familial [fAmIlj6ì]. While pre-rhotic raised /a/ is a well-documented feature of generalised vernacular French, its occurrence here, as with velar /l/, seems clearly attributable to contact with Flemish, since [æ] was noted in other phonological contexts like blague [blæk]. Diphthongised variants also occurred, as in tijd [tA@ t] ‘time’, although the example quoted is a part of a clear code-switch: on a beau aller au lavoir chic’t was tijd. In unstressed syllables, /a/ had variable centralisation to [@] as in [ö@p@öe] réparer.




The front close rounded vowel /y/ was realised with a lax [Y] variant in stressed syllables, as in une [Yn], and weakened to schwa in unstressed ones, as in culotte [k@lfi Ot]. When followed by , /y/ was variably diphthongised, as in tué [tyw ej ]. Some variation across speakers was noted, in particular the tense realisation with possible length distinction of /y/ by VD, whereas Eugène’s most frequent realisation was lax, as in [rY] rue, [Zej zY] Jésus and [fIgYK] figure, where a lax variant of /i/ also occurred. The mid-vowel distinctions /ø/-/œ/ and /o/-/O/ were variably neutralised. In the examples quoted by Baetens-Beardsmore (1971: 73), the loi de position observed in most French varieties is reversed, with close variants in closed syllables [Zøn], as in jeune and jeûne, while the open variant was capable of being diphthongised in open syllables, e.g. feu [fœj ] or heureux [œrœj ]. In contrast, VD used a vowel of intermediate quality in all cases, whereas the reverse obtained for /o/-/O/, neutralised towards a sound of intermediate aperture transcribed as a raised variant of the open vowel of mainstream varieties [fi O] akin to the Flemish sound, as in: D’abord des files d’autos de reporters [dAbfi Oö de fIl dfiOtfiO d@ ö@pfiOötœ;ö]. VD and Eugène distinguished /o/ from /O/ quite clearly in items like beau [bou ]. Like /E/, [fi O] was variably nasalised before /n/, as in bonnes [b˜ Ofin]. Finally /u/ tended to be realised with a lax pronunciation, most audibly before dark /l/ as in foule [fUì]. All three descriptions note four nasal-vowel distinctions, as in principe [pöE˜sIp], wallon [wAl˜ ˜ and France [fö A ˜ s]. None of fiO], un [œ] Baetens-Beardsmore’s transcriptions indicate vowel lengthening, while Warnant’s (1997) description suggests it is far from uncommon. As the examples cited indicate, schwa resulting from vowel gradation was susceptible to elision, as in naturellement [nAtöElm A ˜ ] or procureur [pöfi Oköœ;ö]. Word-final sequences canonically characterised by obstruent + liquid + schwa were variably subject to metathesis to [@] + liquid, as in marbre [mArb@r] or article [ArtIk@l]. Intrusive schwa between consonants is frequent in Flemish, as in melk ‘milk’ [mEl@k]. The main characteristic of the consonants of marked Brussels French is the devoicing of canonically voiced consonants, particularly in wordfinal position, as in Antibes [ A ˜ tIp], merde [mErt], réserve [rezErf], gueuze [gœ;s] and belge [bElS]. Since Flemish, like most varieties of Netherlandic, has no voiced velar stop in its phonemic inventory, French /g/ may be realised with its voiceless correlate, as in Camargues [kAmArk]. Sometimes the voiced velar fricative [7] characteristic of Flemish may occur, in any of the main phonological contexts, word-finally as in fatigue [fAtI7], word-medially as in magasin [mA7Az˜ E] and initially as in grave [7öAf]. Sequences of /sk/ tend to be pronounced with a markedly backed fricative as in scandale [sχ A ˜ dAì].




Devoicing is not restricted to word-final position, and word-medial assimilations may occur, e.g. ontvangen [fi OtfAN@], échevin [ESf˜E] and confiserie [kÕfs@öI]. In Netherlandic, pairs such as /p/ and /b/ can be differentiated by the greater degree of tension in the voiceless variant. That said, canonically voiced or voiceless consonants may be realised by an intermediate sound capable of interpretation as voiced by a French listener, e.g. [bAö A ˜ ] parent. Hypercorrect voiced forms are not uncommon, e.g. [z A ˜ dwIS] sandwich and [tK A ˜ sIzjÕ] transition. As the transcriptions cited suggest, there are three main realisatons of /r/: firstly an apical rolled variant [r] typical of most varieties of Flemish; secondly a uvular approximant characteristic of both Standard Dutch and mainstream varieties of French [K]; and thirdly a strongly fricative uvular variant, often described as ‘guttural’, transcribed as [ö] by Baetens-Beardsmore but possibly tending towards a strongly fricative [χ ] or pharyngeal variant [è]. As already mentioned, /l/ is realised by an apical (clear) variant pre-vocalically and a velar variant post-vocalically as in l’Hôtel Colbert [lfi OtEì kfiOìbE;r]. The velar variant, as cited above, favours a rounded realisation of back /a/ as in local [lfi Ok6ì] and a lax variant of /u/ as in foule [fUì]. Liquid consonants that become word-final through the elision of schwa are often elided after obstruents, as in rendre [ö A ˜ t] and or capable [kapAp]. The obstruents themselves, as in the examples, may be devoiced. Another characteristic shared with Picard-influenced varieties in Wallonia and northern France is the occurrence of /l/ where mainstream French varieties have /j/; this is because [L], the so-called ‘l mouillé’, did not develop in the northernmost marches of the Romance domain. This results in forms like [bUìwAö] bouilloire and [Aìjœ;ö] ailleurs. Although the traditional Flemish dialect of Brussels has the palatal nasal /ñ/, it varies with [nj] before /e/ in the French of these speakers, as in panier [pAnjej ] and accompagner [AkÕpAnjej ]. As the contact variety has no /h/, Brussels French unsurprisingly has none. As with most varieties of French spoken in Belgium, the marked Brussels pronunciation has only two glides, with [w] replacing the front /4/ of Reference French.

6.3 Regional varieties in Wallonia – substrate and perceptions Although Oïl varieties enjoy greater vitality in Wallonia than elsewhere, they are undeniably recessive as social practices. The rather sanguine




estimates of Kloss, McConnell and Verdoodt (1989), based on data gathered in the 1970s and early 1980s, suggested that 59% of the population had knowledge of the endogenous languages, compared to figures cited barely a decade later by Fauconnier (1998) and Francard (1999b), which put the proportion at around 30% to 40%, reduced further to between 15% and 30% by Lemaire (2009: 3). Francard underlines the large generational differences: 70%–80% for the over 60s (birth year up to around 1930) compared to around 10% of ‘young people’ (born since 1960, say). Any such vitality might be thought to maintain language contact, with the result that regional accents within Wallonia should be differentiated along the lines of the substrate dialects, shown in Map 6.1. Two of the varieties, Gaumais (Lorrain) and Champenois, are both geographically and demographically marginal and the most markedly recessive (Francard, 1999b: 21). The dialectal divisions defined by Lechanteur (1997: 85) as between Picard, West Walloon (Wallo-Picard), Central (Namurois), Eastern (Liègeois) and Southern Walloon (Wallo-Lorrain)

Map 6.1 The traditional dialect regions of Wallonia (Rossillon, 1995: 57; Lechanteur, 1997: 85)




find no clear reflection in the mental geography of French accents in Belgium. Some scholars like Francard (1999b, 2001) argue that accents are emerging around a small number of large urban areas, particularly Brussels, Liège and Charleroi, where between 40% and 50% of francophones live, and to a lesser extent Mons, Namur and possibly Tournai. Perceptual studies by researchers in Mons have shown that Belgian informants can reliably distinguish Belgian from French accents (between 89% and 95% of ‘correct answers’; Moreau and Brichard, 1999), although these figures are considerably higher than those quoted by Brichard (1991), (56%–67%). As regards the identification of regional accents within Belgium, correct answers dropped dramatically to between 6% and 7.8%. Older subjects proved more capable of identifiying regional accents than younger, men than women and middle-class than working-class subjects (Bauvois, 1996). A study by Bauvois and Diricq (1999) took recordings of twenty informants from each of five cities (Brussels, Liège, Charleroi, Mons and Tournai) evenly divided by age and gender. The recordings, stripped of regionally marked lexis or other references, were played to 120 judges from Mons having three educational levels (lower-secondary; upper-secondary/tertiary; university) over four age groups (15, 21, 30–40, 65–75). The judges were asked to locate the speakers in relation to Mons according to cardinal points of the compass and to fourteen towns and cities shown on a map. Overall, they identified the urban area of origin correctly in around one case in four. The score for broad regional identification was slightly lower, but would have risen to close to one in two had the regions been deduced from the names of cities in the responses given (as was the case in Bauvois, 1996). The judges evaluated other accents in relation to Mons, suggesting broadly that they perceived three regions: west of Mons (Tournai, Mouscron); east of Mons (Charleroi, Liège, Namur); north of Mons (Antwerp, Brussels, Ghent, Ostend). Charleroi was perceived as relatively similar to Mons, despite its different substrate (Map 6.1). The overall results are far from clear. For Mons the proportion of correct responses varies little, whether one takes the proportion of all responses or all responses where the city is mentioned (32.8%–33.2%). Compared to the other cities, however, the difference is considerable, since by the first criterion Mons is the most reliably identified origin and by the second, fourth out of five. In other words, when one of the three other cities was mentioned (Liège, Tournai, Brussels), the rate of correct answers was higher.




This picture, based loosely on the perceived varieties of large urban centres, receives some confirmation through the relative absence of Oïl substrate features in vernacular varieties. Of 32 ‘dialect’ features (22 of which are phonetic and ten morphological) listed by Remacle (1972), only three can be claimed to be widely noted in regional varieties of French. These are: word-final consonant devoicing (WFCD); a long open variant of /i/ which may be diphthongised, e.g. vie [vij] or [vEj]; and use of /h/ in the ‘aspirate h’ set exemplified by hêtre [hEtö]. It is arguable that WFCD is more widespread in French than in Walloon, since l’Atlas linguistique de la Wallonie (Remacle, 1953: 62) shows considerable variability, with speakers from certain areas, notably in the south of the arrondissement of Dinant and the southerly part of the province of Luxembourg, and those from locations near the national border with France not using the feature (Hambye, 2005: 131). Like WFCD, long, lax and sometimes diphthongised variants of vowels, including /i/, are common to both Brussels and eastern Wallonia. Use of /h/, on the other hand, is restricted to eastern Wallonia.

6.4 Descriptions in the 1970s and 1980s In this section we summarise the descriptions of Walter’s (1982) lone Walloon informant and four of the exemplars from Francard (1989a), comparing their findings with those of the wealth of inventories of Belgian vernacular features: Grégoire (1956); Remacle (1969); BaetensBeardsmore (1971, 1979); Piron (1979, 1985); Pohl (1983, 1985, 1986); Reuse (1987); Warnant (1997); Ball (1997); Klinkenberg (1999, 2000a, 2000b); Pöll (2001); Francard (2001) and Hambye, Francard and Simon (2003). Most of the listings (exceptions to this are Grégoire, whose aim is to correct ‘les vices de la parole’, Baetens-Beardsmore, who of course focusses on Brussels, and Reuse who concentrates on Charleroi) are descriptive in intent, and attempt to cover the whole of francophone Belgium, perhaps encouraging a more unitary perspective than the discourses to do with regional identity previously noted might suggest. Walter’s informant, MLL, from la Roche-en-Ardenne, born in 1923, was a French-Walloon bilingual whose parents spoke only Walloon, although they understood French. The daughter of a farmer, married to a carpenter, she had received limited secondary education and had followed her mother by working from home as a seamstress and later as a hotel chambermaid. Although Francard (1989a) contains sequences recorded by speakers from Verviers, Charleroi, Namur, La Calamine (German-speaking area), Bastogne, Mons and Mouscron, we discuss here only the first four.




The other three were for various reasons of limited use for our current purposes: the Bastogne extract focusses on two elderly men speaking Walloon who, however, switch briefly to regionally accented French when speaking to the primary-age grand-daughter of one of them; the Mouscron sequence illustrates a range of phenomena – the influence of local varieties of Flemish, from the immediately adjacent part of Flanders, the influence of Picard as well as a relatively unmarked accent; and the Mons exemplar is an Italian woman, who, having lived for decades in Mons, is cited as an example of a well-integrated migrant whose foreign accent is claimed to new add colour to the already varied linguistic palette of Belgium. The non-supralocal French features are listed in Table 6.5 in descending order of likelihood of occurrence. While some caution is required Table 6.5 Features of marked accents in five locations in Wallonia (based on Walter, 1982; Francard, 1989a) R-en-A

Verv

Char

Nam

La Cal

Word-final consonant devoicing

+

+

+

+

+

Lax realisations of /i/ /y/ /u/

+

+

+

+

+

/œ/-/˜ ˜ E/ distinction realised

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

+

Nasal vowels realised long

+

+

Long or diphthongised /e/ or /E/

+

+

+

Long [a:] for /A/

+

+

+

Long /œ/

+

/wi/ as in lui

+

Disyllabic pronunciations

+

Incomplete nasalisation

Orthographic ie realised long [i:]

+

Realisation of /h/, as in hêtre

+

Nasal vowels fronted or raised

+

Backed realisation of /r/

+

+

+ +

+

+

+

Close /o/ before /r/

Neutralisation of /o/-/O/

+ +

+

Long /o/

+

+ +

+ + + +

Key: R-en-A = La Roche-en-Ardenne; Verv = Verviers; Char = Charleroi; Nam = Namur; La Cal = La Calamine.




in interpreting the tabulation as an implicational hierarchy, given the possibility of chance gaps, comparison with the numerous overviews listing Belgian regional and vernacular features suggests that with some exceptions, discussed below, items occurring in three or more of the sequences can be considered characteristic of most Belgian vernacular varieties, while features occurring in only two columns may be considered regionally restricted, and the two features occurring in only one column appear to be more supralocal, but not generalised in the speech of the selected subjects, largely because of a number of lexical restrictions. Some of these features, notably WFCD, the maintenance of the /a/-/A/ and /œ/-/˜ ˜ E/ contrasts, diaeresis in items like scier and the absence or restricted distribution of /4/ have already been shown to be compatible both with prestige varieties (Section 4.8) and vernacular Brussels accents (Section 6.2). In some cases the features need to be more narrowly defined to show acknowledged regional or social differences. With regard to geographical restrictions, a velarised realisation of back /a/ is likely to be heard in western Wallonia (Picard substrate) or Brussels. Weakened realisations of vowels in polysyllables, such as téléphone [tEl@fOn] are characteristic of both Brussels and eastern Wallonia. The fronting of / A ˜ / to [ã] and the raising of /˜ E/ towards [˜e] seem to be characteristic of eastern Wallonia (La Roche-en-Ardenne, La Calamine), as is the realisation of /h/ as in hêtre (La Roche-en-Ardenne, Verviers). Diaeresis carries much more social marking if reinforced by a glide, as in scier [sije], tuer [tywe] or louer [luwe]. Vowel-lengthening can justly be described as an old-fashioned standard feature if it marks masculine-feminine distinctions, as in fumée [fyme:] and amie [ami:], but not if reinforced by a glide as in [fyme:j] or [ami:j]. Cases where vowel-lengthening occurs without phonemic contrast as in [pöOblE:m] problème, [aöE:n] arène, [E:l] aile and [lE:s] laisse, are generally construed as vernacular. Similarly, while lax realisation of high vowels has been shown to be compatible with Brussels middle-class usage (Walter, 1982), lax realisation of mid-vowels tends to be more marked, e.g. téléphone [tElEfOn] crapule [köapøl], except in the case of common monosyllables such as les, mes, ces pronounced e.g. [lE], where they can be interpreted as old-fashioned standard. The neutralisation of /o/-/O/ may be taken as a sign of levelling rather than divergence from supralocal French, since historically the distinction could occur in open syllables, permitting differentiation of sot and seau. Not only do such pronunciations run counter to the loi




de position, but other forms are also divergent, such as fosse [fOs] or restaurant [öEsto:ö A ˜ :], both of which can occur in generalised vernacular French. Lengthening is widely noted for the nasal vowels, but not the rather weak nasalisation which seems to emerge from analysis of the exemplars in Francard (1989). The traditional stigmatisation of marked Walloon accents can be encapsulated in the term wallonner as characterised by Remacle (1969: 70): Pour caractériser en général la manière dont les Wallons prononcent le français, on peut dire qu’ils “wallonnent”, ou, en d’autres termes, qu’ils parlent avec une lourdeur pâteuse. Remacle adds that the impression of slow speech-rate is largely conveyed by vowel lengthening, but this has been shown to be sociolinguistically complex, ranging from realisations compatible with the prestigious to the highly stigmatised. This is not to say that stigmatisation is an automatic precursor to loss, as Thiam’s (1995) study of apical /r/ in the Borinage demonstrates (Section 6.6). The distinction between prestigious and generalised vernacular Belgian features is nevertheless far from clear-cut, as three mnemonic sequences show. Pohl (1985) proposed L’ourse brun pâle est enrouée [luKsbKœpa ˜ : lE t A ˜ Kue:] where WFCD and realisations such as [lwi] lui are not exemplified, in contrast to Hella’s model sentence (1991, quoted in Francard: 2001: 266) Ces huit Belges n’aiment pas les sots [sEwibElSnEmpalEsO], which also features open /o/ in an open syllable. An earlier sequence used by Pohl (1979: 36), huit chaînes trop larges [wiSEñtKOlaKS], widens the sociolinguistic spectrum further by adding nasalised vowels. As will become apparent from the following sections, recent variationist work is insufficient both in quantity and scope to clarify many of the questions raised by the classic descriptions of Belgian French, since it focusses understandably on a rather limited subset of the items discussed in this section, as well as on a number of widely occurring vernacular forms.

6.5 Variationist studies The sites selected for study (Table 6.6) in a variationist perspective only partly reflect perceptions of the regional distribution of accents, and cover only a fairly narrow range of variables (six in total, if only those




218 Social and Linguistic Change in European French Table 6.6 The locations of recent sociolinguistic studies in Belgium

Mons arrondissement ville

Population

249,878 91,196

Borinage Brussels

142,196 67,844

Liège arrondissement ville

594,597 188,907

∗

WFCD, WFPOLD (Bauvois, 2001, 2002a, 2002b) + other variables listed in Table 6.11 Apical /r/ (Thiam, 1995)

1,031,215

Tournai arrondissement ville

Gembloux

Variables studied

22,074

/r/ (SAV), ∗ (Hambye, 2005, 2008) WFCD, /r/(SAV∗ ), schwa (Hambye, 2005, 2008) Vowel length, /r/ (SAV), schwa (Hambye, 2005, 2008) WFCD, /r/ (SAV), schwa (Hambye, 2005; 2008)

strongly articulated variant

studied in conversational style by Bauvois (2002a, 2002b) are taken into account). In addition to this rather restricted linguistic range, only apical /r/ in the Borinage and vowel lengthening in penultimate syllables in Liège can be interpreted as regional features within Belgium, the others having social-class value (schwa, WFPOLD, strongly articulated variants of /r/) or WFCD, which is pan-Belgian but also occurs in Switzerland and certain regions of France, where its social meaning is radically different from Belgium. Given the small number of studies under review and the significant differences in methodology, we have chosen to discuss the Borinage in Section 6.6, Mons in 6.7 and Hambye’s PFC-inspired study in 6.8, before reviewing those aspects of perceptual studies focussing on regional vernacular usage (6.9).

6.6 The Borinage (Thiam, 1995) Thiam’s (1995) study of the use of a traditional dialectal feature in the local Borinage pronunciation of French, alveolar /r/, shows it to possess continuing vitality among speakers of all social classes, although it is recessive. Thiam depicts the community as post-diglossic, with few subjects expressing themselves spontaneously in the local variety of Picard, although in the 1960s, Ruelle (1981) noted a substantial minority of Picard speakers, even among children. Apical /r/ is the most frequently cited feature of local speech (77.6% of the sample).



Location

Map 6.2 Mons-Borinage

Despite having a remarkably strong sense of identity, the Borinage is ill-defined territorially, although Quaregnon is seen as its heartland (other communes are Jemappes, Frameries, Dour, Hornu, Wasmes, Boussu and Pâturages). Crucially, contrary to the current administrative arrangements shown in Map 6.2, the area is or was felt to be separate from Mons. The traditional economic mainstay of the region, coal-mining, fell into terminal decline after a short-lived post-World War II boom, leaving by the 1960s an area in crisis as the pits closed. Despite this demise of the main industry, the local sense of identity remained strong, so much so that even local politicians had been known to use alveolar /r/ to connect with their voters. According to Thiam (1995: 91–2), the use of this local variant is part of a package signalling a ‘true’ Borain, imbued with proletarian values typical of mining communities, whose




members see themselves as open-hearted, hard-working, plain-speaking and fun-loving. The sample divides into four age groups (35 subjects aged 10–12; 30 aged 18–25; 30 in the 30–50 range and 25 over 55) and three levels of education, (the 10- to 12-year-olds were too young to fulfil the educational criteria): A (Higher), having completed secondary education and possibly some higher education; B (Intermediate), with four years of secondary education; C (Lower), having left school without the leaving certificate, the traditional target qualification for pupils from workingclass backgrounds. Subjects were recorded in a three-part interview in which they were firstly asked set questions about what it meant to be a ‘true Borain’; secondly the reading of an encyclopaedia article defining the territorial limits of the area; and thirdly, a phase of conversation. Use of data was quite selective in that the first occurrence of seven key words, such as Borinage, Quaregnon and Dour was counted in each phase of the interview, giving 21 tokens for each of the 120 informants. This restricted character of the lexical data might well have encouraged greater use of the local variant, since local toponyms could be focal points of identity and be pronounced in traditional ways more readily than other vocabulary items. That said, Thiam reported considerable style shift between the reading task (with higher use of uvular variants) and spontaneous conversation. In conversation, the figures in Table 6.7 still point to a decline in the use of alveolar /r/, which is used by only a minority of speakers under 50, as against the majority of subjects over 55, in both cases cutting across level of education used as a social-class index. The one puzzling feature of Table 6.7 is the higher proportion of [r]-users among the youngest age group, compared to the 30–50 year olds. The analysis by gender shown in Table 6.8 suggests that alveolar /r/ is becoming a strongly masculine feature. That conceded, the Table 6.7 Proportion of sample using alveolar [r] and uvular [ö] or both variants [ö±] in the Borinage, by education and age (Thiam, 1995: 83) 18–25

Higher Inter Lower

30–50

Over-55s

[ö]

[r]

[ö±]

[ö]

[r]

[ö±]

[ö]

[r]

[ö±]

60.0 60.4 30.0

40.0 33.8 65.2

0 5.7 4.7

70.0 44.7 20.0

21.9 43.8 75.2

8.1 11.4 4.7

36.3 29.1 25.0

57.7 61.7 75

5.9 9.1 0




Regional Varieties & Levelling: Belgium and Switzerland 221 Table 6.8 Proportion of sample using alveolar [r] and uvular [ö] or both variants [ö±] in the Borinage, by education, age and gender (Thiam, 1995: 84) 30–50

Over-55s

[ö]

[r]

[ö±]

[ö]

[r]

[ö±]

[ö]

[r]

[ö±]

Higher M F

40.0 80.0

60.0 20.0

0 0

60.0 80.0

32.4 11.4

7.6 8.6

21.4 51.2

75.0 40.5

3.6 8.3

Inter

M F

60.0 60.9

40.0 27.6

0 11.4

29.5 60.0

59.0 28.6

11.4 11.4

14.3 44.0

73.0 50.0

6.1 5.9

Lower

M F

20.0 40.0

80.0 50.5

0 9.5

0 40.0

90.5 60.0

9.5 0

25.0 25.0

75.0 75.0

0 0

point of age differentiation for women seems to be around 55, with an identical proportion of women using [ö] in both younger age groups for each of the three levels of education. The scores for the 10- to 12-yearolds show comparable gender differences (56.9% for boys and 41.3% for girls). It would be interesting to see whether the same informants, particularly female, now in their 20s, have maintained this behaviour into adulthood. For men the situation is somewhat less clear-cut. For those having four years of secondary education, Table 6.8 shows a decline across the generations, with three-quarters of the over-55s and only 40% of the 18–25 group using [r]. Among the least well-educated males, the proportion of [r] users remains high and more of the under-50s use it than the over-55s. Among the men with the highest level of education, the alveolar variant shows a dipped pattern, with more of the youngest group using it than the 30–50s, though without a return to the proportions among the over-55s. It would appear that a shift to the uvular variant led by the women with the highest level of education has been halted and to some degree reversed. The apical variant symbolising local identity tends unsurprisingly to be a masculine feature, while still being used by some women from each of the socio-economic categories. The study looks of course only at people who have stayed in the area, and one can ask whether the school pupils would be so firmly attached to the region once they realised the restricted job opportunities available. Moreover, all but three of the adult informants had mining connections in their close family. The three ‘outliers’ did not share the same sense of local identity professed by the others. The maintenance of the local variant appears to be a conscious act of resistance against levelling norms



18–25


working through the nearby urban centre of Mons, perceived as a ‘ville de riches’ where people ‘fransquillonnent’.

The work of Moreau and Bauvois (1998) and Bauvois (2001, 2002a, 2002b) is sociologically innovative in seeking not only to analyse the speech of people from all social strata, but in attempting also to go beyond the functional or linear model of Anglo-American variationist studies to reflect the French sociological tradition, as exemplified in the work of Bourdieu which sees individuals rather in a multidimensional social space. These scholars nevertheless defined social class in a largely Labovian manner, using a combined index covering educational achievement, income and professional status (‘prestige professionnel’). This last was based on a four-point scale derived from the classification of Chambaz, Maurin and Torelli (1998) on the basis of 3,600 responses covering 122 occupations. This study set out to show the increasing premium placed on job security and worker autonomy, to the relative detriment of paper qualifications, although level of remuneration remains a key element of professional status. The researchers felt obliged to adjust upwards the scale of educational achievement (Table 6.9) to reflect the fact that people are now spending longer in full-time education and going to university than a few decades ago.1 Bauvois attempted to factor in other elements used by Trudgill (1974) to define social class, such as area of residence and type of housing, by devising a four-point scale of local taxation rates (‘revenu cadastral’). She also extended Labov’s social mobility index by taking into account the mother’s profession as well as the father’s. Given the criticisim levelled at Labov and Trudgill for classifying married women not in paid employment according to their husbands’ occupation, Bauvois added a category for all informants, both female and male, classifying them Table 6.9 Four-point scale of levels of educational achievement used in Mons studies (Bauvois, 2002a, 2002b) 4. Diplôme universitaire 3. Diplôme de l’enseignement supérieur de temps court 2. Diplôme de l’enseignement secondaire ou technique 1. Diplôme primaire ou professionnel ou moins



6.7 Mons (Moreau and Bauvois, 1998; Bauvois, 2001, 2002a, 2002b)

according to their spouse’s profession. Social mobility was measured, as in Labov’s study, by any difference in social prestige and qualifications required between the subject’s first job and his or her current occupation. More interestingly, Bauvois adds a subjective evaluation of her informants’ social status, potentially different from the results of the ‘objective’ criteria. While readers interested in the detailed breakdown of the results are referred to Bauvois (2002a: 89–301) or the appendix in Bauvois (2002b: 233–52), what emerges is that the individual factors making up the social-class index are no more discriminating than the combined index, with which of course they overlap. Some, such as levels of local taxation, are secondary, providing few additional insights. The study is commendable for the number of informants covered: no fewer than 96, divided equally by gender and spread evenly over the four social classes defined by the combined index similar to Labov’s. But it is fairly unsurprising that the initial selection criteria proved the most crucial. With regard to social mobility, father’s occupation was a more reliable predictor than that of the mother, possibly because the father’s profession tends to determine the level of family income over a long period, against the career breaks more typically taken by women. The subjective evaluation suggested that women were more likely to overrate and men to underrate their social status in relation to the objective factors presented above. The informants were chosen for their local origins; all were born in Mons (including Frameries and Quaregnon, Figure 6.2) and had spent on average 80% of their lives in the area. Bauvois deliberately eliminated the age factor by selecting informants over a relatively narrow range, between 33 and 42. They were interviewed individually at the researcher’s home. Some were better known to the researcher, and/or more at ease in her presence. Bauvois took the view that these reactions were quite disparate in relation to the informants’ social characteristics, and therefore did not in any way distort the overall results. Table 6.10 lists the variables studied, only two of which, WFPOLD (5) and WFCD (6), were analysed in conversational style, based on informants’ response to the investigator’s request to recount the most important event of their lives. Otherwise, subjects were asked to perform two tasks: firstly a Definition task (D), in which informants were asked to offer a word on the basis of a dictionary definition or, if necessary, a gap-filling exercise, e.g. case defined as ‘dans les pays tropicaux, habitation en paille, en branches d’arbres’ or if a further prompt were needed,





Variable

Examples

1

Affrication: [dj]-[dZ]; [tj]-[tS]

dieu, étudiant, radio, Thierry, quartier, tiers

2

Diaeresis in sequences containing glides plus vowel in supralocal French [jÕ]-[iÕ]; [ue]-[uwe]; [4e]-[ye]

lion, ciel, souhaiter, avouer, buée

3

Reduction of [lj] sequences to [j]

escalier, milieu, million

4

Addition of ichlaut (voiceless palatal fricative) to word-final vowel [i]-[ix]

merci

5

WFPOLD: Liquid dropping (/r/and /l/) after obstruent in word-final position, e.g. centre [sA ˜ t]; siècle [sjEk] or [siEk]

propre, disciple, encre, miracle, chiffre, gifle

6

Word-final consonant devoicing (WFCD); [b]-[p]; [d]-[t]; [g]-[k]; [v]-[f]; [z]-[s]; [Z]-[S].

jambe-rampe; cède-sept; bague-bac; bave-baffe; case-casse; sage-sache; brigue-brique

7

Schwa after voiced consonant

8

Average difference in vowel length before voiced and voiceless word-final consonants.

9

Silence before word-final consonant

10

Vowel lengthening in orthographic sequences , and compared to , and , potentially followed by an orthographic consonant

lit-lie, bout-boue, cru-crue

La _____ de l’Oncle Tom; secondly, a Reading Exercise (R), using 100 sentences containing key words, often in final position.3 Two variables, (8 and 9), were analysed instrumentally. The results are presented in Table 6.11. The range of percentage frequencies given in the right-hand column of Table 6.11 is assumed to reflect variation across social-class differences. Perhaps the most significant result is that diaeresis emerges as a strong majority variant even in the formal tasks, in contrast to the other variants, with the exception of schwas before a voiced consonant, which are clear minority forms. The stylistic variation between the definition and reading tasks is by no means consistent, although some variables, particularly the reduction of [lj], correlate strongly with social class (SC4 reducing very little and SC1 considerably more).



Table 6.10 Variables selected for study in Bauvois (2002a, 2002b)2

Regional Varieties & Levelling: Belgium and Switzerland 225 Table 6.11 Overall percentage frequencies of occurrence in Mons study (Bauvois 2002a, 2002b) for Definition (D), Reading (R) and Conversation (C) tasks for seven variables D

R

C

Affrication Diaeresis Reduction of [lj] Ichlaut WFPOLD WFCD Schwa after voiced C

27 81 20 4 6 18 45

26 79 6 4 3 20 38

38 38

Range 4–59 (R) 72–87 (R) 0–18 (R) 6–25 (R) 10–66 (C) 19–61 (C) 12–58 (D)

The conversational data suggest that low scores in the formal tasks (as is the case for WFPOLD) do not necessarily imply that the variants concerned are marginal or confined to older speakers from the lower social classes, especially if one also bears in mind the overall mean of over 22% for WFCD in a different sample of Montois university students (Moreau and Bauvois, 1998). In Table 6.12 the cross-tabulation of all social categories with gender, the principal focus of the Bauvois studies, produces some curious results. At the higher and lower ends of the social spectrum, the patterns of stratification are as would be expected – Social Class 4 using considerably more prestige variants than SC1 and women scoring higher than men of equivalent social status. For SC2 and SC3, the patterns Table 6.12 Frequencies of use of two variables across three styles by gender and social class (Bauvois, 2002a) Definition

Reading

Conversation

men

women

men

women

men

women

67 12 20 6

51 28 12 2

62 24 24 1

51 30 18 1

60 36 34 20

61 52 21 19

29 2 1 0

13 1 0 0

11 3 0 0

11 0 0 0

60 27 10 29

66 45 27 15

WFCD SC1 SC2 SC3 SC4 WFPOLD SC1 SC2 SC3 SC4



1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Variable

are rather patchy when correlated with gender. For instance, women in SC2 drop more liquids and devoice more than their male counterparts, whereas SC3 displays a more traditional pattern. When one looks at each gender separately, however, far clearer patterns of social stratification emerge, particularly if apparent irregularities turn out not to be significant. Taking the results for the conversational style, men from SC1 use the vernacular forms considerably more than their counterparts from the higher social classes. For WFCD, men from SC2 and SC3 behave similarly, with frequencies intermediate between those of SC1 and SC4. The low score for liquid deletion by men from SC3 requires some comment. This socially odd distribution is replicated in the graph showing correlations to the professional status of the spouse (Bauvois, 2002a: 157) and the combined educational attainments of both parents (p. 161) but it is not replicated for annual income (p. 154), the father’s (p. 160) and mother’s level of education (p. 158), their professional status (father, p. 162; mother, p. 159) or indeed by any of the subjective evaluations (p. 167). Women, on the other hand, show a much more graduated stratification across the social range with SC1 and SC2 and SC3 and SC4 relatively similar to one another and each pair dissimilar from the other. In an earlier study, Bauvois (2001) conducted a series of three experiments focusing exclusively on WFCD, using only completion and reading tasks. In all three studies, the informants were students, with an average age of 20. As in the study already described, the informants were from Mons, and had lived at least 80% of their lives in the area. In the first study 80 students were following courses of socially differentiated status, in ascending order: ‘professionnel’, ‘technique’, ‘graduat’ and ‘universitaire’. In the second, 60 students training for three different professions, nursing, primary-school teaching and youth work, were asked to perform the tasks described above. In the third experiment, the focus was on the effect of the researcher. Four interviewers (two male, two female, two French, two Belgian) interviewed a total of 96 higher-education students (both university and non-university) evenly divided among the four researchers. The results show significant social stratification with consistent but not statistically significant gender differentiation. Unexpectedly, the women informants devoiced more than the men. In terms of social mobility, calculated by the difference in the number of years of study between the subject and his or her father or mother or a combined score for both parents, it was the intermediate of three levels of mobility, which included the women,




who devoiced the most and the men the least. With regard to the effect of the interlocutor, informants devoiced more with the female interviewers than the male and with the Belgian more than the French investigators. Bauvois’ results gave some confirmation to the findings of a previous study by Lafontaine (1986) on primary-school teachers suggesting that in this highly feminised profession which serves nonetheless as a linguistic role-model, men tend to use more standard forms than their female colleagues, as if they believed that greater effort was required of them. On the other hand, in another highly feminised profession, nursing, gender differentiation was not significant, although the men devoiced more in the completion test. For both genders, trainee nurses devoiced the most, followed by the youth workers, with the primary-school teachers devoicing less than the other two groups. The differences between the three groups proved to be significant only for men (2001: 31). What is more significant is the considerably greater levels of vitality of WFCD compared to those observed in Lille by Pooley (1996, 2004), where informants born before 1938 devoiced in about one case in four with scores of younger speakers dropping to well below 10%. Among the youngest speakers studied in Lille (born around 1980), even though they were all from the equivalent of SC1, WFCD had been reduced to marginality, a finding confirmed with subjects born around a decade later. Levels of liquid deletion, however, were maintained across the four generations studied in Lille-Métropole at a higher level than in Bauvois’ conversational data, i.e. consisently over 80%. If Bauvois’ data are considered equivalent to Pooley’s (1996: 285) interview style, i.e. one-to-one conversaton with an investigator, then the overall average of around 60% is not greatly different from SC1.

6.8 Brussels, Gembloux, Liège and Tournai (Hambye, 2005) This highly ambitious and in many ways insightful study follows the methodology of the PFC project, designed to focus primarily on phonology and only secondarily on sociolinguistic issues. The corpus consisted of 48 speakers, 12 from each of four locations – Brussels, Liège, Tournai and Gembloux – evenly divided by gender. Informants were selected to cover the full adult age range, and informants’ social-class profiles were retrieved post hoc. In the corpus overall and even in sub-samples from two or three locations, speakers proved fortunately to be representative in level of education and social mobility (Table 6.13). Differences in educational level used in the calculation





Age

Education

Social mobility

AGE1 19–28

SCOL1 no HE

MOB-1 Lower level of education than father

AGE2 36–50

SCOL2 HE non university

MOB0 Same level of education as father

AGE3 54 and over

SCOL3 graduate

MOB1 Education 1 level higher than father. MOB2 Education 1 or 2 levels higher than father; or 1 level higher AND profession more prestigious than father’s MOB3 Education 2 or 3 levels higher than father; or 2 levels higher AND profession more prestigious than father’s

of social mobility were based on a six-point scale, which was simplified to five as shown in the table. Following standard procedures agreed by participants in the PFC study, informants were asked to read a list of 94 words and a continuous passage of 331 words, take part in a guided conversation with an unknown investigator and a free conversation with a known researcher. The four corpora were selected from a much larger number sampled in Belgium, including the two largest francophone cities (Brussels and Liège), as well as an area of western (Tournai), central (Gembloux) and eastern Wallonia (Liège). Hambye chose to study four variables, but not in all four areas (Table 6.14). The structural definition of WFCD used by Hambye differs slightly from that of Pooley and Bauvois, since he added a seventh pair, /N/-/nk/, to the six studied by the other investigators. Unlike Pooley, Hambye did not consider cases of WFCD which arise following liquid deletion after an obstruent, as in possible [pOsip]. Table 6.14 Location and variables studied by Hambye (2005) Variable

Location

1. Word-final consonant devoicing (WFCD) 2. Vowel lengthening 3. /r/ 4. Schwa

Gembloux; Tournai Liège Brussels; Gembloux; Liège; Tournai Gembloux; Liège; Tournai



Table 6.13 Social profile of speakers

Along with the higher overall rates of devoicing in Gembloux particularly and Tournai, compared to those in Roubaix and Mons, another structural factor emerges as significant for the occurrence of WFCD, namely occurrence before a voiceless consonant. What is more remarkable is the consistent difference in the behaviour of speakers from the two towns. The Tournaisiens devoice mainly before voiceless consonants, which they do more than the Gembloutois. The only other context where WFCD occurs frequently in Tournai is pre-pausally (around one token in four). In all other contexts, i.e. before sonorants (nasals, liquids and glides), vowels and schwas, WFCD rates were around 40% in the conversation data from Gembloux. Only before vowels was WFCD a marginal variant (around 5%). The Tournaisiens devoiced fricatives (/v/, /z/ and /Z/) more than stops, whereas the Gembloutois devoiced both types. Table 6.15 shows considerably greater variation in the Gembloux data in regard to the age and level of education of the informants. In Gembloux it is the speakers aged 54 and over who devoice significantly more than the under-50s, and those with graduate education who devoice the least of any of the 12 groups in the table, with non-graduates devoicing at over 40%. In Tournai, on the other hand, the similarity of frequencies (between 21% and 25.9%) across the age range and social categories is quite remarkable, suggesting that WFCD is a stable but not marginal minority variant that is not strongly stigmatised. A cross-tabulation of gender, social mobility and location produces no significant differences (Table 6.16). In Gembloux WFCD emerges as a significant minority variant (at around 40%) with a remarkably

Table 6.15 Overall rates of WFCD in Conversation in Gembloux and Tournai by age and level of education (Hambye, 2005: 151) Gembloux AGE3 55.0

AGE2

AGE1

SCOL1

SCOL2

32.6

31.2

47.6

41.4

SCOL3 19

Tournai AGE3 23.7

AGE2

AGE1

SCOL1

SCOL2

SCOL3

25.9

21.3

21.0

22.9

25.9

Key: AGE3: 54 and over; AGE2 36–50; AGE1 19–28.




230 Social and Linguistic Change in European French Table 6.16 Overall rates of WFCD in Conversation in Gembloux and Tournai by gender and social mobility (Hambye, 2005: 151)

Women

Men

MOB0/1

MOB2/3

42.1

36.8

39.6

39.4

Tournai Women

Men

MOB0/1

MOB2/3

21.7

25.1

25.2

15.7

even distribution across categories. The Tournai figures show no great difference between the genders but some indication that more upwardly mobile speakers devoice less often. Assuming that the Tournai results were reproducible over a more robustly representative sample (the Tournai informants are better educated than their Gembloux counterparts), they can be interpreted as having sociolinguistic significance in a number of ways. Firstly, it should be borne in mind that phonologically favourable contexts do not automatically mean that the occurrence of a favoured variant is not socially significant; secondly, the social make-up of the samples would lead us to expect lower rates of WFCD in the usage of the Tournaisiens compared to the Gembloutois; thirdly, the results bear striking similarities to those from Mons (especially Moreau and Bauvois, 1998), where similar overall rates of devoicing occur, mainly with fricative consonants; fourthly, as Tournai becomes part of a cross-border Lille-Métropole agglomeration, the maintenance of WFCD by young graduates at levels comparable with those in marked working-class varieties used mainly by older speakers only a few miles away over two decades earlier (1983 Roubaix corpus used in Pooley, 1994), suggests socially significant differences on both sides of the national border. The overall charting would lead us to confirm an approximate geographical distribution as follows. Firstly, WFCD has become at most marginal in Lille and in France in general (unless new evidence were published from Alsace, say); secondly, in western Belgium the set of variants is stable, used by all social classes and apparently not stigmatised; thirdly, WFCD is more frequent in more easterly parts of Wallonia, where it shows a more socially skewed distribution of variants



Gembloux

being most used by older and less well-educated speakers, but also by socially more favoured speakers at rates similar to those noted in Mons and Tournai. Comparable scores derived from cases of devoicing in very different phonological contexts may nevertheless prompt different perceptions of the speech of Tournai and Gembloux (or western and eastern Wallonia), although this is one factor only in a complex structural system. The data suggest that relatively heavy use of WFCD (40% or more) marks a stigmatised variety, but a score of around half that level obeying certain structural constraints seems not to be particularly frowned upon. Lower frequencies of use and occurrence in a narrowing range of contexts are generally indicative that a variant is recessive. The data from Tournai, and possibly Mons, suggest that any such recession has slowed considerably and that there is good reason to believe that Belgians of all social backgrounds will continue to use WFCD as a socially significant minority variant. Hambye (2005: 178) chose to investigate cases of vowel lengthening construed as a vernacular variant by examining the phenomenon in the penultimate syllable of intonation groups. Apart from the clarity of phonological definition, there are cogent sociolinguistic reasons for selecting this environment. It is noted in a number of descriptive studies, such as Francard (2001: 256), as particularly salient for both Walloon and Brussels accents. In Hambye’s data, however, the phenomenon proved not to be generalised across the four locations studied. It was highly marginal in three cities, with Liège standing out as the exception. In Liège, a realistic initial hypothesis would have been that vowel lengthening in penultimate syllables occurred mostly in the speech of older speakers from the lower social classes. Hambye (2005: 189) also took into account stylistic variation, effectively between guided conversations (with an unknown investigator) and free (with a known researcher). The overall frequency of occurrence turned out to be very low (3.3%) and the data show another clear sign of the obsolescence of the feature, referred to as lexicalisation by Pooley (1996), such that the feature occurs at high rates in a few frequent lexical items, such as ici, maison and vraiment. Moreover, two vowels /e/ and /E/ are responsible for a high proportion (38.6%) of the total number of occurrences. In terms of its social distribution, Hambye’s results produced no surprises. Older speakers with the least formal education lengthened vowels in penultimate position the most and had the least stylistic variation, even compared to younger speakers of comparable social status. For all age groups, both indicators




of higher social status, educational level and social mobility, correlated with greater use of short vowels. Hambye argues nonetheless that despite its relative infrequency the vowel-lengthened variants are highly salient. This salience, along with their relative marginality and their historical reputation (cf. Remacle, 1969), suggests that the variants are tending towards the stereotypical. Hambye’s painstaking analysis identified nineteen variants of /r/. Twelve of these variants are voiced-voiceless pairs: uvular fricatives [K]-[X]; pharyngeal fricatives [Q]-[è]; uvular trills [ö]-[ö]; intermediate ˚ irregular taps) variants (fricative trills, describable as trills with rather ˇ ]-[ö ˇ ]; alveolar trills [r]-[r]; alveolar fricatives [ˇô]-[ˇô]; uvular flaps [ö˘ ]-[˘ [ö ö]; ˚ flaps [R ]-[ «R ]; and ˚ ˚ ˚ two vowel-like approximant alveolar variants, which are either uvular [K fl ] or alveolar [flô]. A final variant was deletion of /r/. The variants were context-sensitive; for example, devoicing and deletion were highly likely after a voiceless obstruent, as in lettre, and most variation was observed in word-final and word-initial position. Certain kinds of variation, like the difference between fricatives and trills, did not seem to be socially significant. Alveolar articulations proved rare, used indeed by only one speaker, and this was taken as indicative of recession. For Hambye the variants that stood out perceptually were not necessarily markedly back, but they were strongly articulated (‘renforcé’) and he chose therefore to report on the results of the Reading Tasks and twenty tokens from the free Conversation. Three structurally sensitive contexts were found to be significant in the Reading Task. They are listed as follows, and the results summarised in Table 6.17: (a) intervocalic position or adjacent to a voiced stop; (b) word-initial position after pause, post-vocalic position at the end of an intonation group and occurrence adjacent to a fricative; (c) adjacent to a voiceless stop. These results suggest, perhaps unsurprisingly, that adjacency to a voiced sound i.e. Context (a), is likely to result in a voiced correlation of /r/ and least likely to favour strongly articulated variants (SAVs). Context Table 6.17 Most frequently occurring variants of /r/ by percentage for Reading Tasks for 47 speakers from Brussels, Gembloux, Liège and Tournai Variants of /r/ Voiced Strongly articulated (SAV) Fricatives

Context (a)

Context (b)

Context (c)

67.2% 6.7% 46.9%

24.8% 14.1% 59.2%

3.3% 30.8% 53.2%




(b) is relatively neutral and Context (c), adjacent to a voiceless stop, is most favourable to SAVs, which are nonetheless a minority form. These structural constraints were broadly confirmed in the free Conversation data, which showed that SAVs are more likely to occur in stressed syllables. Moreover, SAVs proved less frequent in Conversation than in the Reading Task, suggesting that they are prestige variants (Hambye, 2005: 230–1). The breakdown by age and standard of education shown in Table 6.18 shows clearly that the younger university-educated speakers (28 and under), who also have the highest index of social mobility, although this is not specifically indicated, use SAVs much more than their older and less well-educated and less mobile counterparts. Regional origin shows a curious pattern which, as with WFCD, has the Tournaisiens manifesting stable variation as against the apparent change elsewhere, if at different rates, suggested in Table 6.19. Cross-tabulation of age and locality masks the fact that the Tournaisien speakers emerge as the highest users of SAVs. Dividing speakers into the younger (28 and under) and older (36 and over) age groups Table 6.18 Percentage use of SAVs in Reading Task and Conversation for 47 speakers, by age and education AGE3

AGE2

AGE1

Word List Frequency of SAVs

9.8

12.3

29.3

Conversation Frequency of SAVs

7.1

11.3

21.8

SCOL1

SCOL2

SCOL3

Word List Frequency of SAVs

13.3

Frequency of SAVs

10.5

13.0

25.8

Conversation 10.0

20.1

Table 6.19 Percentage frequency of SAVs by speakers from four locations, by age (Hambye, 2005: 237)

36 and over Under 28

Brussels

Gembloux

Liège

Tournai

7.5 27.8

8.0 15.0

4.7 41.1

22.6 23.7




points to a stable level of use across generations in Tournai with sharp increases in the two largest cities, Brussels and Liège. The use of SAVs rises in Gembloux but they remain strongly minority variants. These results suggest that far from being a vernacular feature characteristic of the lowest social classes, SAVs are emerging as prestige variants used in formal styles. Hambye’s analysis of schwa tends to disconfirm some descriptive accounts (e.g. Pohl, 1985, 1986; Grégoire, 1956: 74) claiming that Belgian speakers insert schwa less than their French counterparts in certain contexts. Hambye argues that these rates are indicative of stylistic variation and similar to all non-southern French varieties. We focus on four major variable contexts that were analysed in the reading passage and the two conversational styles. Relevant schwas in the orthography are underlined: (1) (2) (3) (4)

V#C_C, e.g. va venir V#C_#C, e.g. joue le match C#je#C, e.g. donc je parle $je#C je parle (post-pausal)

The results show unsurprisingly that schwa is realised more frequently in reading than in conversation, and more in guided than free conversation. Moreover, the two contexts with je emerge as the most favourable to schwa realisation, at least among older speakers. Indeed, the age patterns are the most consistent, with speakers aged 36 and over inserting schwa most frequently in all four contexts, with a particularly sharp rise for $je#C (Table 6.20). For speakers aged 28 and under, graduates Table 6.20 Frequency of use of schwa in combined conversational styles for four contexts by speakers from Gembloux, Liège and Tournai, by age and level of education (Hambye, 2005: 320–3) Context V#C_C V#C_#C C#je#C $je#C OVERALL

OVERALL

AGE3

AGE2

AGE1

28.9 20.0 52.6 56.1 32.0

23.6 29.0 55.6 63.4 31.8

15.4 13.0 28.0 15.5 15.6

SCOL1

SCOL2

SCOL3

27.1

29.6

20.7




Regional Varieties & Levelling: Belgium and Switzerland 235 Table 6.21 Geographical and age distribution of overall schwa realisation in conversation style (Hambye, 2005: 325)

36 and over 28 and under

Tournai

Gembloux

24.8% 7.8%

33.6% 31.3%

Liège 37.1% 6.8%

insert the least, with level of education having no significant effect for speakers of 36 and over, although a higher index of social mobility corresponds to higher frequencies of schwa realisation, particularly among the older generations. Comparing age patterns with geographical origin suggests that the tendency to delete variable schwa in the two larger cities is further advanced than in the small provincial town of Gembloux. Undermining this is the fact that there are fewer graduates among the 28 and under group in Gembloux (Table 6.21). Hambye interprets these results in terms of speakers’ orientation to the norm. Young graduates style shift quite markedly, and Hambye suggests further that the style-shifting by this group is indicative of mastery of the norm and hence confidence in their competence acquired in the education system, a confidence which gives them the freedom to deviate from it, showing what Bourdieu (1979) referred to as ‘désinvolture’ or absence of tension in spontaneous speech. Table 6.20 certainly suggests that younger speakers are extending variable schwa insertion across phonological contexts to one which is partially governed by the three-consonant rule (Context 3).

6.9 The findings of perceptual studies and summary of the Belgian situation It seems likely that the greater confidence just referred to regarding the norm among younger well-educated people in particular is part of a number of changes occurring also in France, given the apparently increasing conformity with supralocal French norms in other respects, like the loss of the /œ/-/˜ ˜ E/ distinction and use of /4/ (Francard, 2001: 257; Section 4.8) It may well be that behavioural changes are starting to emerge of which respondents to some of the major perceptual studies of the 1980s and 1990s could not have been fully aware (Lafontaine, 1986; 1988; 1991; 1997; Garsou, 1991; Francard, 1993; Moreau and Brichard, 1999a,



Age

1999b). These studies show a rather unenthusiastic recognition of the extraterritorial norm and at the same time a recurrent assertion (if not by an overwhelming majority) that Belgians speak as well as French people. Direct contact with French speakers, as Bauvois (2001) shows, tends however to lead to accommodation to French norms rather than a conscious embracing of ‘belgitude’. A number of indications suggest that the least linguistically secure Belgian francophones come from the higher social classes and that they are most aware of exogenous norms. Francard’s (1989b) study of Lutrebois showed however, contrary to the findings of the pioneering study by Gueunier, Genouvrier and Khomsi (1978), that subjects in a diglossic situation, regularly using Walloon, were relatively secure. But since that study, more recent perceptual work suggests that respondents may express pride in a regional language or accent as part of their cultural heritage, without necessarily maintaining either as a social practice. By and large, despite the striking counterexample of the Borinage, strongly local identities seem to be receding, without a strong collective Walloon or francophone identity emerging. A survey conducted by the newspaper Le Soir in 1997 found that barely 4% of respondents defined their identity by reference to Brussels or Wallonia. Francophones can use regional features without fear of stigma, provided that their speech is not too strongly accented. They tend however to be less aware of the features in their own speech than in others’, and to be generally less judgemental while showing inconsistencies in their evaluation of stigmatisation. Both behavioural and descriptive studies point to the persistance of a number of non-supralocal French features which are rather illdefined in their sociolinguistic significance. They occur both in Brussels and Wallonia. Perceptual studies (e.g. Bauvois and Diricq, 1999) affirm the recognisability of Belgian voices, but without being able to locate them reliably. As Klinkenberg (1999: 515) suggests, many Belgians may be trying to effect a compromise between the perceived snobbishness of French usage (often associated with Brussels) and the stigma of traditional contact-induced vernacular forms.

6.10 The Francoprovençal substrate in Suisse romande Turning now to the Swiss situation, in general the traditional Francoprovençal and Oïl languages spoken there can be said to be in as weak a position in terms of their social practice as in many parts of France, and much weaker than in Belgium. Language shift had occurred in the large Protestant cities by the 18th century, and in the four officially Protestant




cantons (Bern, Genève, Neuchâtel and Vaud) only 1% of the population claimed in the 1990 census to speak the ancestral language. In the Jura, the proportion was 3%, although Lehmann (1995) and Kristol (1998) argue that the age of the speakers (all over 60) suggests the percentage could be construed as a sanguine view of the language’s vitality, particularly as a pre-World War II study by Keller (1937) in the south of the canton portrayed it as being on the cusp of extinction. In the Catholic cantons self-reported levels of use were higher: around 4% in Fribourg and 6% in the Valais, but this according to Matthey (2003: 93) merely implies that in these areas people consider the traditional tongues to be part of their heritage, in contrast to the Protestant areas. Against this, there is at least one well-documented case of a variety of Francoprovençal being transmitted to children, in the remote mountain commune of Evolène du Val d’Hérens (Valais) (Pannatier, 1995; Maître and Matthey, 2004: 380), where more or less every child in the six villages of the commune in the 1970s and around a third in the 1990s were speaking the local form at home when they started school. Despite these pockets of vitality, Matthey (2003: 93) takes the view that the regional French of Switzerland shows few if any traces of Francoprovençal influence (Knecht, 1985; Matthey, 2003). The most striking feature was in prosody, the tendency to stress the penultimate (paroxytonie) rather than the final syllable of a phonic group (oxytonie) as in supralocal French,4 although this occurs in a number of other regions. It is arguable too that contact with German has exerted some influence, although on the other linguistic levels there has in recent decades been strong resistance to germanisms. For Matthey (2003: 94), the distinctiveness of Swiss French is characterised by the maintenance of certain archaisms or old-fashioned standard features, such as the continued use of /œ/ ˜ and phonemic vowel length, which she regards as the most distinctive trait in Swiss varieties.

6.11 Regional varieties (Geneva, Neuchâtel, Valais) According to Singy’s (1996: 234–8) Vaudois informants, Geneva (33.6%) and Neuchâtel (29.7%) are the reference points most frequently cited as the places in Suisse romande where the best French is spoken. We have already referred to our own informal observations on Geneva, and other informal comments (Voillat, 1971; Singy, 1996) go in the same direction. Other factors, such as the international character of Geneva and its being part of a trans-frontier urban area (cf. Tournai in Section 6.7) favour advergence to supralocal French. The studies available, by Métral




(1977) and Schoch et al. (1980), give only fragmentary indications of advergence; in particular, the /œ/-/˜ ˜ E/ merger has advanced furthest there (Schoch et al.1980: 10) and the /o/-/O/ alternation in final open syllables as in peau-pot does not occur. Behavioural data on the canton of Neuchâtel are slightly less scarce; these include Walter’s (1982: 194) profile of a speaker from La Chauxde-Fonds (population 37,000) and a recent study of vowel lengthening by Grosjean et al. (2007) plus a preliminary report of a PFC-inspired study (Racine, Bühler and Andreassen, 2009). Walter’s subject (LL) was a primary school teacher (b. 1922) who spoke Francoprovençal and took an active interest in folkloristic activities. Contrary to the observation of Métral (1997: 168) that the Neuchâtelois merged /a/-/A/, LL distinguished them quite clearly. The data presented by Grosjean et al. strongly suggest that phonemic vowel lengthening in pairs distinguished by ‘feminine’ orthographic <e>, as in aimé-aimée; ami-amie; bu-bue; clou-cloue, are still differentiated phonologically by vowel length. Against this, LL distinguished these four pairs only in open final syllables, with /i:/ diphthongised to /ij /, whereas the mid-vowels /φ:/ and /o:/ and low vowel /A:/ plus the nasal /œ˜:/ were variably lengthened in closed syllables. LL had diaeresis in scier, buer and bouée, with glide insertion in the first item: [sije]. He used a velar but not a palatal nasal and his variants of /r/ were uniformly uvular. A preliminary analysis of data collected using the PFC protocol (Racine et al. 2009) confirms the maintenance of length distinctions, the /a/-/A/ contrast (but relying more on quality rather than on length and quality, as in Nyon) and the /o/-/O/ distinction in open syllables. Informants from the Valais present a rather confused picture. Schoch et al. (1980) who questioned school pupils from Saint-Maurice (around 4,000 inhabitants) present in some respects a relatively conservative variety, with the majority of informants claiming that they maintained the /a/-/A/ and /œ/-/˜ ˜ E/ distinctions and /o/-/O/ in open syllables rather more than the Suisse-romande mean. Métral found that the Valais informants claimed a high percentage of phonemic vowel length for vit-vie (95%), slightly above the overall mean but below the main norm-setting cantons of Geneva, Neuchâtel and the Vaud. The rates of professed distinctions for cru-crue (62%) and armé-armée (73%) were considerably lower, and again lower than for Geneva, Neuchâtel and the Vaud, but still above the Swiss average, mainly because the rates of neutralisation in Fribourg were extremely high. Diaeresis in scier was claimed by about a third of informants and realisations of en haut with /h/ by only a tiny minority. The comparison of Walter’s (1982: 195–6) three informants




from the canton yields a less coherent picture, as shown in Table 6.22. Her informants were: MP, a woman from Orsières (population 2,736), born in 1899 who spoke her local variety of Valaisain and had worked as a hotel chambermaid; CAZ, a man from Sierre (population 16,355) born in 1921 who spoke his local variety of Francoprovençal and made a living as a farmer and market gardener; and AF, a man from BotyreAyent (population 3,365) born in 1952, who also spoke his local dialect and at the time of the fieldwork was head of the local tourist office. Table 6.22 shows that apart from /h/, the non-supralocal French consonantal features are common to all three speakers, as is the peau-pot distinction. The youngest of the three maintains vowel-length distinctions for all six high and mid-vowels in both contexts. For the others, particularly the oldest informant, the variation is context-dependent and quite restricted. In other respects the older informants show greater variation, particularly in the nasal-vowel variants, with fronted variants of / A ˜ / and raised ones for /˜ E/. AF, born more than half a century later, was particularly attached to his local roots. Table 6.22 features

Comparison of Walter’s Valaisain informants with regard to key Swiss

Orsières 1899

Sierre 1921

Botyre-Ayent 1952

1. Vowel length: high vowels

Only [ij ] in open syllables

Only in open syllables

In all contexts

2. Vowel length mid vowels

Only [ej ] in open syllables

Length distinctions except for /ø/ in open syllables

In all contexts

3. /a/-/A/

Quality distinction Length or quality reduced; length in syllables; by attenuated /A/ or /A;/ quality in checked syllables

Attenuated in open open syllables; by length or quality in checked syllables

4. /œ/-/˜ ˜ E/

4 nasals; /˜ E/ raised to /˜e/; /A ˜ / fronted to /ã/ or centralised to /˜e/

E/-˜e/; 4 nasals; /˜ /A ˜ /-/ã/ used variably

4 nasals; variable use of /õ/-/˜ O/

5. peau-pot

YES

YES by length

YES

6. scier [sije]

YES

YES

YES

7. /h/

NO

YES

YES

8. Palatal nasal

YES

YES

YES

9. Velar nasal

YES

YES

YES

10. Labialisation of YES /S/ i.e. /Sw /

YES

YES




CAZ from Sierre maintained the /a/-/A/ pair fully, while the other two informants attenuated either the quality or length distinctions. There is no clearly defined pattern by age or size of town. The personal profiles of the informants suggest that the fact of MP’s working in a service occupation may have encouraged accommodation, leading to the loss of some distinctions, whereas the local rootedness of AF would encourage affirmation of ‘Swissness’. It should be borne in mind, however, as is demonstrable from data on the Vaud discussed in the next section, that intra-cantonal differences may be greater than inter-cantonal.

6.12 The Vaud: behaviour and perceptions Within the Vaud, the data gathered by Schoch et al. (1980) allow comparison of informants from the cantonal capital Lausanne (pop. 193,463) and the upcountry town of Moudon (12,501), placed by Singy (1996) among the intermediate peripheral zones of the area. Tables 6.23 and 6.24 suggest that in some respects at least, the Lausanne subjects

Table 6.23 Percentage proportions of claimed mergers among Swiss secondaryschool pupils in selected lexical items for /œ/-/˜ ˜ E/(Schoch et al., 1980: 10) Item

brin-brun empreinte-emprunte N

Region Geneva

Lausanne

St. Maurice (Valais)

Moudon (Vaud)

Fribourg

35.9 66.9 142

10 26.2 130

16.5 35.1 97

9.9 38 71

11 34.3 73

Table 6.24 Percentage proportions of Swiss secondary-school pupils accepting douze-douce and vide-vite as acceptable rhymes (Schoch et al., 1980: 14) Item

douze-douce vide-vite N

Region Geneva

Lausanne

St. Maurice (Valais)

Moudon (Vaud)

Fribourg

16.9 30.3 142

20 24.6 130

13.4 22.7 97

26.8 33.8 71

5.5 9.6 73




differed more from their Moudon counterparts than they did from Genevans or Neuchâtelois. The Moudon informants were unusual in a number of ways. Not only were they most tolerant of WFCD (Table 6.24), but they also claimed neutralisation of /ñ/ and /nj/ to the greatest extent, while best maintaining the rat-ras contrast and a phonemic distinction between / A ˜ / and / æ/ in pairs like répandra-dépendra. Turning to behavioural data, we now compare the speech of Walter’s Vaudois informant (1982: 195) with that of the subjects of Andreassen and Lyche (2003) and Andreassen (2004, 2006). Walter analysed the speech of AG, a male informant who was relatively well educated (to Baccalauréat) and highly skilled (an electro-mechanic for Swiss Rail), born in 1935 in the small village of Villars-sous-Chambon (population 282). The social profiles of Andreassen’s informants, who were all from Nyon and the surrounding areas (Gland, Begnins and Prangins), are shown in Table 6.25; 12 adult informants in all, aged 30 to 70 and recorded in 2001–02 using the PFC protocol. Andreassen’s oldest informant is actually three years older than AG, and the 23-year gap (1978–2001) between the two sets of recordings

Table 6.25 Sex

Profiles of informants interviewed by Andreassen (2006: 116) Year of birth

Place of birth

Residence

Profession

1

F

1972

Lausanne

Prangins

Employée de bureau/mère au foyer

2

F

1971

Lausanne

Prangins

Secrétaire

3

F

1956

Nyon

Begnins

Secrétaire municipale adjointe

4

F

1950

Nyon

Nyon

Secrétaire

5

F

1937

Founex

Gland

Mère au foyer

6

M

1971

Nyon

Prangins

Ebéniste

7

M

1970

Nyon

Nyon

Secrétaire municipal

8

M

1970

Prangins

Prangins

Plâtrier peintre

9

M

1957

Nyon

Gland

Employé de commerce

10

M

1946

Bex

Nyon

Ingénieur chimiste

11

M

1943

Begnins

Nyon

Fonctionnaire de police retraité

12

M

1932

Vallorbe

Gland

Docteur en science retraité




might be thought to yield some evidence on changes occurring in Vaudois French. The picture emerging from Andreassen’s data is in fact little different from the Suisse-romande koiné that Métral considered as most consistently manifested in the Vaud. In several respects, Andreassen’s speakers are more conservative than AG, in particular in their maintenance of the /a/-/A/ contrast by both length and quality. They consistently distinguished not only pattes and pâtes, as do most Swiss speakers, but also rat and ras and mal and mâle, where the distinction is increasingly neutralised. In a number of cases, i.e. before sibilants or liquids, where the distinction is neutralised, back variants are used in contrast to most other varieties, e.g. sondage, impasse, fédéral and picard. Tables 6.26 to 6.28 suggest greater conformity to the koiné in the more recent data, and maintenance of older standardising features Table 6.26 Comparison of Vaud speaker (Walter, 1982: 195) with PFC data (Andreassen and Lyche, 2003; Andreassen, 2004, 2006) for oral vowels in open syllables Front unrounded

Front rounded

Back

Walter

PFC

Walter

PFC

Walter

PFC

i/ij

i/i:

y/y;@

y/y:

u/u;@

u/u:

j

e/e:

o

o

Oˇ /Ö

O

a/a;

A/A:/Aj

e/e

ej/e:j

E/E: a

ø

ø

a

Table 6.27 Comparison of Vaud speaker (Walter, 1982) with PFC data (Andreassen and Lyche, 2003; Andreassen, 2004, 2006) for oral vowels in checked syllables Front unrounded

Front rounded

Back

Walter

PFC

Walter

PFC

Walter

PFC

i

i/i:

y

y/y:

u/u:

u/u:

E/E:

e

ø/œ;

ø:

o:

o:

E/E:

œ

œ/œ:

O/o

O

a:

A/A:

a

a




Regional Varieties & Levelling: Belgium and Switzerland 243 Table 6.28 Comparison of Vaud speaker (Walter, 1982) with PFC data (Andreassen and Lyche, 2003; Andreassen, 2004, 2006) for nasal vowels

E˜

œ˜ a˜ @˜

PFC

O˜

E˜

œ˜

O˜

a˜ A ˜

now largely lost in supralocal French, in particular the more consistent signalling of /a/-/A/ and length distinctions in the high vowels. While AG tended to realise these distinctions by weak diphthongisation, e.g. /i/-/ij / in open syllables, the Nyon informants use vowel length in both open and closed syllables. The Nyon subjects, however, use diphthongised variants of /e/, as in année [a.nej] or tournée [tuK.nej] and /A/ as in noie [nwAj]. AG showed clear indications of neutralisation of /a/-/A/, indeterminate quality (indicated by italics) and attenuated length distinctions, e.g. [a;]. Both samples showed a four-term set of nasal vowels (Table 6.28) and variable use of fronted realisations of / A ˜ /, as in artisan [aK «.tizã], but only AG used the raised centralised variant [˜@]. Considering the position of Nyon in the Bassin lémanique, as much in the orbit of Geneva as of Lausanne, this consistent maintenance of a classic koiné-like variety is somewhat surprising, given the prestige of Geneva French and the oft-quoted (and now firmly historical) observations of Voillat (1971), largely corroborated by Singy (1996) with regard to widespread convergence towards supralocal French norms in Suisse romande.

6.13 More recent perceptions of marked varieties in the Vaud (Singy, 1996) Singy’s perceptual study of the Vaud is remarkably thorough. There are 606 respondents with an even male–female split, three age groups (40 and under, 40–65, 65 and over), four social classes (higher, new middle, traditional middle, lower) conflated on the basis of cogently presented arguments from the division into socio-professional categories used by the Office Fédéral de la Statistique. Respondents were divided into four areas of residence on the argument that Lausanne and its immediate suburbs was the central reference point (Zone 1; Table 6.29) and that other areas of the canton were relatively peripheral: other towns with more than 9,000 inhabitants were classified as Zone 2, the



Walter

244 Social and Linguistic Change in European French Table 6.29 Towns and districts of the Vaud studied in Singy (1996) listed by zones Population (2004)

Lausanne

Density per km2

193,463

2,281

13,897 16,321 21,831 10,435 17,267 25,252

377 6,857 653 3,172 2,531 2,245

35,674 6,535 21,449 46,090 14,614 4,506 12,000 6,151 10,519

82 92 108 223 124 24 284 38 72

11,754 21,449 21,405 23,626 55,946 12,501 10,557 19,468 20,497

77 108 160 251 536 104 139 94 337

Zone 2 – Town with 9,000+pop Morges Vevey Montreux La Tour-de-Peilz Nyon Yverdon Zone 3 – Peripheral districts Aigle Avenches Grandson Nyon Payerne Pays d’En-Haut Rolle La Vallée Yverdon Zone 4 – intermediate peripheral districts Aubonne Cossonnay Echallens Lavaux Morges Moudon Oron Orbe Vevey

most peripheral districts excluding the major towns as Zone 3, and intermediate peripheral districts as Zone 4. While Lausanne is taken as the norm-setting reference point within the Vaud, it is a poor third in perception (12.7%) behind Geneva (33.6%) and Neuchâtel (29.7%) in Suisse romande as a whole, even in the eyes of the Vaudois themselves. There is a somewhat reluctant recognition of the double extraterritoriality of the norm, firstly, within francophone



Zone 1 – District of Lausanne

Europe (France and Paris are perceived as norm setters) and secondly, within Suisse romande. Within the Vaud on the other hand, Lausanne scored highest (63.2%), followed at a great distance by Montreux and Nyon (3.6% and 3.3% respectively), although the number of ‘don’t knows’ (25.7%) is uncomfortably large. The Lausannois are perceived as having ‘less accent’ and as using fewer Vaudois words than their fellow Vaudois, around half of whom believe that the inhabitants of the regional capital think they speak the best French, while just over a third (36.3%) believe that residents of Lausanne also make negative judgements about them as non-Lausanne residents (Singy, 1996: 248), as do the French and Parisians. Other Vaudois recognise with reluctance the exterior prestige of Lausanne, but express few positive feelings towards the French spoken there, compared to their own. Someone from the peripheral areas of the Vaud (exemplified by Payerne, Zone 3) is in the majority view (75%) on an equal footing with a Lausannois. These results appear to constitute a less than whole-hearted endorsement of Lausanne as a centre of reference for the region, save perhaps by default, since it is the main urban centre with around six times the population of its nearest rivals, Yverdon-les-Bains and Montreux. While respondents were, for the most part, reasonably comfortable with the way they spoke, they manifested clear signs of linguistic insecurity when their speech was compared to that of the French. The least secure groups are the highest social class and women. In contrast, the least insecure groups are the over-65s, those living in peripheral zones and members of the lower and traditional middle classes. The relative security of the latter is bolstered by the fact that these categories contain many independent, self-employed business people, who enjoy a relatively protected and stable place in Swiss society. This suggests that linguistic insecurity increases with international contact among francophones. The higher social classes are by and large subject to more contact, compared with older people from a generation who travelled less, and with self-employed tradesmen who largely work in internal markets. Within the comparative security of Switzerland, respondents were mainly positive about their French, and arguably perceive themselves as speaking ‘un français régional de bon aloi’, which excludes lexical dialectalisms and germanisms but not what would be regarded in France as old-fashioned standard forms, such as the masculine-feminine length distinctions




and the /œ/∼/˜ ˜ E/ contrast, which rather like septante may be regarded as at least equally and historically more ‘correct’ than the supralocal form. It is curious that while the recent data show clear signs of the maintenance of phonological distinctions characteristic of older standardising norms, they show few, if any, phonetic distinctions that are most often socially marked. In lexis, these trends are confirmed by Manno (2003), who argues that Swiss French is undergoing dedialectalisation but not deregionalisation, since the majority of Swiss neologisms noted over the course of the 20th century were innovations.

6.14 Conclusion Belgian and Swiss francophones both recognise the prestige of French norms (often in their perception Parisian), but take considerable pride nevertheless in at least some of their divergences from them. Both are likely nonetheless to modify their speech towards supralocal norms in direct interaction with a French person, being no doubt intuitively aware of the attitudes expressed in Kuiper’s study (2005: 38–42), in which Swiss and Belgian accents were placed 23rd and 24th, below those of each of the 22 regions of France in regard to correctness and pleasantness, as well as degree of difference from the Parisian norm. Within their own countries, the majority would however admit to a certain pride and pleasure in the use of forms associated with either national or more narrowly local identities. In both territories, it is the higher social classes, most exposed to interactional contact with French speakers, who are the least linguistically secure. The perceived greater degree of security among the lower ranks of society and older persons is undoubtedly due in part to a lower level of awareness of external norms combined with lower mobility, and in part to social pressures not to speak in too ‘pointu’ a fashion. At the same time, dialectically marked speech is heavily stigmatised and avoided, even if, particularly in Belgium, the traditional endogenous languages are more highly valued than in the past. In a recent piece (2008) Hambye provides a useful broad summary of the Belgian situation. The main title of his paper, ‘Convergences et Divergences’, refers to ongoing changes in practice as well as in attitudes towards Standard French. Hambye suggests, on the basis of data drawn from actual behaviour as well as elicitation of the ‘linguistic imaginary’,




that standard Belgian varieties are converging with each other as well as diverging from the French of the Hexagon. The qualification ‘standard’ is important. From the mass of linguistic detail presented above emerges a fairly complex pattern of continuing social differentiation, expressed in part through allegro forms such as /l/ deletion in words like milieu. These seem not to be localised. At the same time, social-regional differentiation finds expression in localised forms like vowel lengthening, though this dimension of differentiation appears to be receding. Convergence to an endogenous norm, functioning in parallel with divergence from supralocal French, is signalled perhaps most notably by WFCD. We can perhaps characterise all this as a form of levelling, in the sense used here. The socio-historical and cultural factors that have shaped Belgium, and the linguistic expression found there, cannot be thought about without taking into account the looming French presence across the border. Nor should the importance of Flemish-Walloon tensions be underestimated. The result is ‘levelling’ construed in a perhaps rather negative or reactive sense; the obverse of the positive sense of identity just mentioned. Perhaps the most striking distinctive feature of the Swiss situation is the wide reach in the broadcast media of ‘legitimised’ (to use Bourdieu’s term) or supralocal discourses, as Thibault in particular suggests (1998). These may however be in contradiction to everyday practice. Thus while the most recent behavioural studies (Racine, Bühler and Andreasse, 2009) point to maintenance of the koiné, this does not wholly fit with the norms of public discourse as illustrated by our study of the TSR evening news. In Belgium, comparable public discourse on RTBF news is more divergent from supralocal French norms, suggesting that a range of features is compatible with prestige pronunciation. This is despite the lack of agreement as to the existence, or even recognition of the specific features, of the Belgian variety. While in both countries, perceptual studies provide strong indications of regional differences, this is not borne out by recent behavioural evidence, at least in the case of Belgium, where a good deal of data is available. It is possible that for Switzerland, concentration on the Vaud distorts the overall sociolinguistic picture, whereas in Belgium the fuller behavioural evidence points to the vitality and general lack of stigma attached to some non-supralocal forms shared by Walloons and Bruxellois, in particular the most studied feature, WFCD.





1. This suggests that people who left the Borinage to pursue higher education tended not to return to the area. 2. The sub-title of Bauvois (2002b) mentions twelve variables rather than ten. Two more sub-divisions result from separating Variables 8 and 9 according to whether the following consonant is voiced or voiceless. 3. E.g. (9) : ‘Ne reste donc pas là à ne rien faire, lève-toi et bouge !’ which focusses on the possible [Z]-[S] alternation in bouge. 4. Stress placement was potentially phonemic in Francoprovençal, e.g. [tsan"ta] chanter and ["tsanta] chante!



Notes

Social Factors: Bringing Together Class, Gender, Migration, Ideology and Language

7.1 Overview of the chapter We attempt to draw together here the threads of earlier chapters in the light of our depiction of the linguistic situation in the territories under scrutiny, beginning with three of the main aspects of social levelling described in Chapter 3: social class, gender and migration. We evaluate their sociolinguistic effects before moving on to issues of ideology and cultural hegemony. We aim to summarise, firstly what can be argued from documented evidence of vernacular French forms, and secondly cases where social and ideological changes have favoured the maintenance and/or valorisation of a traditional ancestral variety. We begin with social class.

7.2 Social class As stated previously, many studies have had recourse to education as a social-class indicator, and the raising of levels of educational achievement since the mid-20th century can be shown to have had clear consequences for linguistic behaviour. Higher levels of educational expectation and achievement have encouraged the abandonment of traditional vernaculars and marked regional forms of French. The social embedding of both types of variety has been shown in several locations to correlate with age, low level of education and often the economic dominance of a traditional staple industry (agriculture, textiles, coal), producing a high degree of class solidarity. The usage of the most recent, least well-educated generations in the same communities points at most to varieties that retain a reduced range of regional features occurring variably, although use of marked vernacular variants has in certain cases 249



7

remained viable at least until the latter part of the 20th century, as in certain parts of Lille (Pooley, 2004) and the Borinage (Thiam, 1995). Along with greater educational achievement has come an increase in service-sector employment, which even in its more modest forms tends to favour frequent encounters with strangers of various social classes, and thus to multiply occasions when a more neutral, levelled style is called for. Even in the locations referred to as examples of vernacular maintenance, signs of moyennisation appear. For instance, Thiam’s (1995) Borinage informants share geographical origins, notably Frameries and Quaregnon, with those of Bauvois in Mons. Table 7.1 compares the educational profiles of informants in the two studies: Table 7.1 Upward drift of educational attainment in Mons region (Thiam, 1995; Bauvois, 2002a) Borinage

Mons 4. Diplôme universitaire

A (Higher), i.e. have completed secondary education and possibly some higher education

3. Diplôme de l’enseignement supérieur de temps court

B (Intermediate), i.e. four years of secondary education

2. Diplôme de l’enseignement secondaire ou technique

C (Lower), i.e. having left school without the leaving certificate

1. Diplôme primaire ou professionnel ou moins

The considerable maintenance of the traditional apical /r/ variant correlates with a relatively modest level of education, proletarian values stemming from the traditional staple industry and a strong sense of local identity distinct from that of the ‘fransquillon’ city of Mons. By contrast, increasing participation in higher education usually entails study at an institution in Mons and interaction with speakers of a less locally marked variety, one where apical /r/ and other features are likely to be marginalised, as is the case elsewhere in Belgium (Hambye, 2005). This upward drift of educational attainment is thus a significant entry point where mainstream ‘fransquillon’ values and practices invade local social space. Pooley (1996) shows similarly that in Roubaix in the 1980s every dialectal variant was used most heavily by older informants with levels of education equivalent to below B or 2. Further examples of upward social drift can be abundantly illustrated in Roubaix, which since the fieldwork of the 1980s has become a centre




for higher education, with some former industrial premises being used as university or IUT buildings. Moreover, some of the most emblematic industrial buildings are now used both for cutting-edge (Eurotéléport) and low-level service industries (retail, mail order). While some of the industrial architectural heritage has been redeployed, this has proved more difficult for residential property, where most of the archetypical courées or terraces have been demolished, including those investigated by Pooley in the 1980s. In parallel, the invasion of the surrounding rural space has resulted in urbanisation and moyennisation of areas traditionally devoted to agriculture. There is good reason to believe that levelling is greatest in such periurban areas, settled over the latter decades mostly by members of the median classes. Pooley (2004) shows for instance that ignorance of the traditional ancestral language was highest in these areas, in contrast to the industrial heartlands and rural communes where intergenerational continuity was greater. With increased levels of educational attainment comes obviously improved mastery of the reference variety, or at least an impression of this. Some education professionals argue that this sense of mastery is based on shaky foundations (Caitucoli, Delamotte-Legrand and Leconte, 2003), while recent work like Hambye’s (2005) has shown that young graduates manifest what Bourdieu termed a certain désinvolture, seen for instance in the wider range of stylistic variation in the use of schwa, compared to older, less well-educated speakers. The emergence of new prestige stylistic features, of which the strongly articulated variant (SAV) /r/ seems to be one, is compatible with the need to mark more formal styles, and the arguable emergence of hyperstyle variables where, as Gadet (1998: 67) observes, the diaphasic aspects of variation assume greater salience. While this principle is illustrated through Hambye’s work on Belgium, there is no particular reason to suppose that such behaviour is specific to that country, for it is quite plausible that young educated Belgians are behaving in this respect like their French counterparts although, for the moment, the data required to demonstrate this are lacking. For France, we may mention again the fairly close correlation between the Rennes panel’s perceptions of the Nancy speakers as working-class (Section 5.1; Table 5.2), and the latter group’s rates of deletion of liquids following an obstruent (WFPOLD) as in tab(le) or quat(re) (Armstrong and Boughton, 2009: 14). In this study the broad WC-MC categorisation (imposed on the informants) was based on occupation, essentially manual/non-manual. On the basis of this admittedly slender and indirect data-base, social levelling as defined above does not therefore appear to be taking place in French, neither in perception nor production. We



Social Factors: Class, Gender, Migration, Ideology and Language 251

can suggest too that this apparently rough-and-ready occupation-based measure of social class appears to be as robust as more sophisticated models. The generalised upward mobility of the post-World War II decades gave rise, as Klinkenberg (1992: 40) observes, to much linguistic insecurity in francophone Europe, given the dominance of the ideology of the standard in the French educational and social traditions, seen perhaps even more acutely in Belgium and Switzerland. Social commentators like Mermet (2008: 204) claim that this unprecedented period of upward mobility has now ended and as Chauvel (2005: 82ff) argues, many young people more highly educated than their parents, particularly in France, face the prospect of downward social mobility, higher property prices and fewer available jobs. This is particularly true since, as Chauvel cogently argues, the expansion of the public sector in the period 1945–1975 has left a pensions burden that limits the possibilities of job creation. Such trends are, however, too recent to reverse the ongoing trend of levelling in France, where linguistic divergence seems unlikely, despite other manifestations of social fragmentation (Section 7.5), although these trends might contribute to the consolidation of differences that have been maintained in Belgium and Switzerland. That said, the considerable body of perceptual studies (Moreau, Francard, Singy) suggest that one can conceive of Belgium and Switzerland as a set of internal markets overarched by the panEuropean (and indeed pan-francophone) linguistic market dominated by France, but capable nevertheless of acting with some independence in their own territory. Thus public figures can speak, although not all do, on national media with audibly Belgian or Swiss accents without the kind of social censure to which they would be subjected in France (Sections 4.8, 4.9). Different linguistic markets within the same country or city may be associated with different degrees of tension, in a manner reminiscent of Labov’s notion of attention paid to speech, the effect of which is measurable in style shift. If, as has been argued for other locations (Section 2.9), destandardisation is increasing, then style shift depends on awareness of legitimised norms, as well as the linguistic competence needed to comply with them. Bourdieu claims that legitimised norms can only be symbolically contravened, as in his classic example of a mayor who switches to local patois. Such ostensible breaking of the normative hierarchy serves in fact only to reinforce it, for both speaker and hearers are perfectly aware that it is a temporary switch and that the speaker has mastery of the standard. While that applies




to France, it does not appear to apply, or at least not in the same way, in certain other countries. Norwegian and Swiss German politicians, for instance, can unarguably gain much symbolic capital by using dialect, and public figures in Belgium and Switzerland may at least speak with their regional or recognisably non-supralocal accent in public discourse without censure (Sections 4.8, 4.9).

7.3 Gender The ‘sociolinguistic gender pattern’ (SGP) (Labov, 1990; Section 3.5) states that in the majority of cases of stable variation, men use more vernacular variants than women with comparable social characteristics. In cases where variation is indicative of change, women will usually adopt the innovative form earlier than men, irrespective of whether the change constitutes convergence to or divergence from a prestige form. These generalisations apply in western societies where gender equality and parity of educational opportunity prevail and gender roles are overlapping and increasingly converging. In societies where these conditions do not apply (in particular, if gender roles show little or no overlap), markedly different varieties may be used by men and women (as in some Amerindian tribes) or prestige variants may be used to a greater degree by men, as in certain Arabic-speaking communities where males still have greater access to education (e.g. Haeri, 1987). Documented female-led changes in the French of France largely concern cases where there is no difference between the prescriptive norm, Reference French and supralocal French, e.g. Lefebvre (1991) and Armstrong and Unsworth (1999). Lefebvre’s data (recorded in the late 1970s) show that women maintained with greater consistency certain variably phonemic contrasts, /o/-/O/ as in côte-cote; /E:/-/E/ as in maître-mettre; /œ/-/ø/ as in heureux or Maubeuge and /a/-/A/ as in patte-pâtes. Along with the maintenance of the contrasts associated with the prescriptive norm, Lefebvre also observed that the female informants generally scored lower on a local-accent index predicated on a number of variables, like a backed realisation of /a/ in word-final open syllables, e.g. là, for which the regional vernacular pronunciation is [lA]. Similar arguments could be built on the evidence in Armstrong and Unsworth’s study of the use of schwa among students in two towns in the Aude, Carcassonne and Lézignan-Corbières. The study shows females apparently taking the lead in moving away from southern norms of schwa realisation in three frequent contexts: (1) #jE crois; # cE qui se passe; (2) c’était PierrE; (3) toutEs sortes, la semainE prochaine. These gender differences appear




to override social class, construed somewhat imprecisely and in binary fashion between MC and WC (cf. the remarks on Nancy above). The results correspond closely however to an index of regional attachment, such that the boys in the study had markedly higher indices of regional attachment and used schwa significantly more. Against this, girls displayed greater mental (geographical) mobility and thus conformed more closely to supralocal norms. Since all these changes point clearly to advergence, it will be of interest to look at (apparent) exceptions, which Pooley (2001b) classified as follows: (1) vestigial variants (2) changes towards supralocal (as opposed to a standard) variants (3) use of vernacular variants correlating with membership of social networks. Cases of feminine vestigial variants or heavier vestigial use of a regional vernacular by women have occurred largely because of their greater longevity and their more restricted mobility in the lower strata of society until well into the first half of the 20th century (cf. Hadjadj, 1981 for clear examples in the Auvergne and the Francoprovençal-speaking Loire). While in UK English a number of cases have been observed of women leading the adoption of changes towards supralocal as distinct from prestige variants, comparable recent examples in French are harder to demonstrate, given the degree of levelling now seemingly present in the reference variety (Lyche, forthcoming 2010). Studies of UK varieties of English like Milroy et al., (1994) in Tyneside and Mees and Collins (1999) in Cardiff have shown women leading the adoption of intervocalic glottal stops as in [b2P@] butter, historically a feature of London vernacular. The closest parallel case in French is the adoption of fronted variants of /o/, as in Maroc pronounced [maöœk]. Armstrong and Low’s (2008) study of Roanne (Loire) shows younger women leading this innovation, which is becoming increasingly frequent in standardised usage. In Table 7.2 below, the proportions of fronted, centralised and back /o/ for individual speakers and speaker groups are shown; these figures are based on an instrumental analysis of each token of /o/. Age and gender differences are quite clear, especially for fully fronted tokens of /o/; those with a value of 2 on a three-way fronting scale where 0 indicates back /o/, 1 a centralised variant and 2 fronted /o/. Informants are coded by gender and year of birth: thus ‘f1954’ means female, born 1954.




Social Factors: Class, Gender, Migration, Ideology and Language 255 Table 7.2 Degrees of /o/ fronting based on formant frequency analysis (Armstrong and Low, 2008: 448) N = 372 Percentage fronting 0

1

2

m1942 m1956 Older males

30.00 43.37 38.35

34.00 27.71 30.08

36.00 22.89 27.82

f1954 f1955 Older females

19.39 25.86 21.79

31.63 34.48 32.69

44.90 39.66 42.95

m1982 m1981 Younger males

21.82 43.90 31.25

32.73 29.27 31.25

39.09 19.51 30.73

f1981 f1981 Younger females

26.19 35.96 31.82

27.38 20.18 23.23

46.43 43.86 44.95

The information given in the rightmost column of Table 7.2, referring to use of the fully fronted /o/ variant, in other words the variant that is the most ‘advanced’ both phonetically and socially, shows clearly the patterns of age and (especially) gender of interest here. Although the male informants are not behaving in a homogeneous fashion, the females are, especially the younger group, and we can suggest very tentatively, in the absence of collateral studies, that any change in progress is being led by them. Milroy and Gordon (2003:102–3) suggest that women are capable of legitimising non-standard variants, such that a feature like the glottal stop in English may gain prestige by the very fact of entering into female usage. Although it is certainly too early to affirm this for t-glottalling in intervocalic position, the ‘ideologised’ character of fronted /o/, to use the term introduced by L. Milroy (2003), appears to be fairly clear. The third type of feminine variant is best exemplified by L. Milroy’s (1987) study of three working-class areas of Belfast, where the younger women from one of the communities (Clonard) made greater use of certain vernacular variants than their male contemporaries. This unusual behaviour corresponded to greater involvement in local networks, measured by factors such as work relations and kinship ties. As Coates (1993) and Wardhaugh (1998) have pointed out, the criteria used by the Milroys generally applied more to men than to women. In francophone



Informant

Europe there is no lack of examples of traditional communities where men were economically dominant, if at modest income levels, with as a result considerable degrees of separation between the genders. Activities like fishing (Léonard, 1998), mining (Hornsby, 2006b) or livestock farming involving transhumance (Ott, 1981) obliged men and women to live much of their lives in separate groups. Among such traditional activities, the textile industry stands out as one where a considerable proportion of women were employed. Studies of the mill town of Roubaix (Pooley, 1996) provide a robust case of reversal of the normal sociolinguistic gender pattern, explicable by reference to social-network organisation. The case of WFCD in speakers born before 1938 in Roubaix (Pooley, 1994, 2006a) shows women born in or before 1938 devoicing word-final consonants as in [saS] sage, and using forms with the non-vocalisation of /l/ like travail(le) [töaval] (Vj-Vl) more than men (of any generation). The classic pattern of men making greater use of the vernacular WFCD form than women was observed in subsequent generations, if at a significantly lower level than for pre-1938 subjects of either gender. The [töaval]-type variants have more or less disappeared from the usage of younger speakers. The most plausible explanation, at least for WFCD, seems to be that most of the older women worked in the textile industry (one of the few where female labour was widely used), which attracted many workers from Belgium, mostly Flemish-speaking, and that both Flemish and Frenchspeaking Belgians are much more likely to devoice than their French counterparts. Both Vj-Vl and WFCD were however perceived differently in the early part of the 20th century compared to their social indexing in later decades. In both cases, there is clear evidence to suggest that both vernacular variants were perceived as French rather than Picard, thus conforming to the pattern of women adopting variants interpreted as representative of a non-local (arguably for the time supra-regional) variety. Another example of SGP reversal explicable by network factors in Lille-Métropole comes to light by comparison of speakers of different ethnic origins three generations younger: the greater use of back /a/ as in [sA] ça by Maghrebian girls (aged 14–15) compared to their male counterparts in a SEGPA1 (Section d’Education Générale et Professionnelle Adaptée) class in Marcq-en-Barœul (Pooley, 1996; 2000). The girls of migrant background backed /a/ in open final syllables in virtually identical proportions to their French classmates, whereas the Maghrebian boys used this regional-vernacular variant much less than any other group defined by gender or ethnicity (Table 7.6 below). The explanation




proposed was that at the time of the fieldwork (January 1995), the girls in the class had been together for two years and a term, whereas the Maghrebian boys were just starting their second term at the school where the fieldwork was carried out. Moreover, their French classmates formed a closely knit group with anti-mainstream values, which the boys in question did not yet share. Social-network patterning that goes against the SGP seems to be fragile, temporary and by definition highly localised. The generations born post-1938 use WFCD considerably less than their predecessors and gender variation displays the ‘classic’ SGP, with men using the vernacular variant more. It can be argued equally that the women of the older generation had adopted it as a supra-regional French variant, one that was hence less characteristic of traditional dialects than the local-regional variety of French which was the target variety of shift (cf. Cochet, 1933; Hambye, 2005). The school-based networks of the 1995 corpus are for different reasons equally fragile, and unlikely to be maintained beyond the time that the informants concerned were thrown together by the education system. The same remarks are true of the Milroys’ results and any similar ones, given that the dominant direction of socio-economic organisation tends to erode tight networks. A case of the SGP seeming to have been more or less permanently reversed emerges from Bauvois’ (2001) study of subjects from three intermediate professions (nursing, primary-school teaching and youth work). For one variable (WFCD) she showed that male primary-school teachers used more standard forms than their female colleagues. An earlier study of Belgian primary teachers (Lafontaine, 1986) showed female subjects maintaining local variants to a greater extent than their male colleagues. This observation was explained by the fact that since primary-school teachers have a high stake in the legitimised variety, male entrants to the profession might feel that they have to prove their loyalty to the practice of the standard and its concomitant values to a greater degree than the female majority of their colleagues. It is also possible that the numerical dominance of women in the staff room may encourage in the man a tendu mindset, to use Bourdieu’s term. By contrast, the other two professions investigated by Bauvois show expected, if not highly significant, gender differences. Greater gender parity might be thought to be leading to the elimination of the differences noted in early variationist studies. Gone are the days when a scholar like Trudgill (1974) could defend his classification of non-working women according to their husbands’ profession or declare, perhaps justifiably at the time, that gender differentiation




of the kind characterised by the SGP was the single most consistent finding of the first two decades of variationist endeavour. More recently, Bauvois (2002b) has argued that social-class differences far outweigh gender differences, whence her title Ni d’Eve ni d’Adam. As with Hambye’s findings on changing social-class differences, it seems more plausible that Belgium is following France rather than manifesting an independent development, although again supporting data are scarce. If it is impossible to tell whether contemporary variation in French will result in social divergence in the long term or differentially paced levelling, the shift from regional languages undoubtedly illustrates the latter trend. Women, generally speaking, abandoned the autochtonous vernaculars sooner than men, for reasons which overlap with those which have been shown to correlate with differential use of vernacular French forms, many of which arose out of contact between the national and the minority language. As Bauvois (2002b) argues for the use of differently valued variants in French, social factors both outweigh and overlap with (or did so in the past) the use of indigenous vernaculars in francophone Europe. These languages were largely spoken in communities sustained economically by traditional primary and secondary activities (Pooley, 2003). The primary-sector activities in particular entailed a clear demarcation of gender roles and physical separation during the working day (as in the case of coal-face workers, exclusively male, and surface-level employees of both genders) or for longer periods (deep-sea fishing or transhumance). A number of case studies in various regions, e.g. Poitou (Léonard, 1991; Auzanneau, 1998); the Basque Country (Ott, 1981; Coyos, 1999); Brittany (Broudic, 1995); the Auvergne and the Loire (Francoprovençal-speaking) (Hadjadj, 1981); and the Tarn (Maurand, 1981) have shown that use of the local languages corresponds closely to the viability of traditional occupations. A number of studies have moreover differentiated between the various types of rural dweller, in particular those whose life-style is increasingly urban in character as against traditional farmers, living in viable local-language speaking communities. These latter occupations were male-dominated, yielding modest yet viable incomes, which both enabled and influenced women to devote themselves to domestic roles. As the importance of education and mastery of French came to be more clearly perceived, the expectation that women would serve as linguistic models to facilitate upward mobility increased. At the time, the mental mobility of women developed more than that of men, as suggested by respective indices of




regional attachment in a study of students as recent as 1999 (Armstrong and Unsworth). In earlier generations, Hadjadj differentiated sedentary from mobile women in their advancing years in the mid-1970s in Celles-sur-Durolle (Auvergne) and Saint-Thurin (Loire) where the more professionally ambitious women of the generation had gone to live in towns and in so doing had adopted French as their principal language. The women who had remained all their lives in the local areas had manifested very little mobility, unlike their male contemporaries, who as children had run errands in neighbouring villages and as young adults were obliged to leave home for military service. Maurand’s study of diglossia in an Occitan-speaking village in the Tarn (Ambialet) shows increasing gender differentiation across the generations, to the point where he can claim (1981: 114) that: Le français est plutôt, mais non exclusivement, la langue des femmes et l’occitan celle des hommes. While this study also shows that for the children of the time in Ambialet the transmission of Occitan is largely reserved for boys, other studies have confirmed that the use of a local language by younger women is either somewhat incongruous (Auzanneau, 1998) or totally inappropriate (Wanner, 1993), to the point where some local-language speakers feel that the presence of a woman is itself a trigger to switch to French. These testimonies show the persistence of the traditional gender differentiation, as well no doubt as the still predominantly female role in the socialisation of young children, creating pressure to act as a model of standard speech, although the influence of social class is unclear. Nonetheless, the increasing degree of equality in the workplace and elsewhere in the public sphere obviates in some measure women’s need to compensate for lack of actual status by adopting symbolic forms of behaviour, including the use of prestigious language. On the other hand, for many men there are fewer work-based contexts favouring markedly differentiated masculine forms of speech behaviour. While gender roles are undoubtedly less clear-cut than in the early to mid-20th century, use of covertly prestigious speech forms still contributes to an image of masculinity and that of overtly prestigious forms to one of femininity. Such traditional divergences are blurred by the fairly recent emergence of now well-known informal categorisations such as camp males and ladettes, but social and linguistic data concerning these are lacking. Much of the foregoing is applicable to all Western post-industrial societies. The distinctiveness of the French situation is perhaps due to what





has already been alluded to, the relatively late industrialisation that allowed rural varieties to persist for longer.

The sociolinguistic consequences of the major migrations of the 19th and early 20th centuries (Section 3.6) have been described by Landrecies (2001) and Pooley (2006a) (Belgians in northern France) and Blanchet (2003) (Italians in Provence). Landrecies (2001: 29–30) claims that Belgian migrants to Roubaix, of whom 88% were Flemish-speaking, were assimilated linguistically into French society through the traditional vernacular language, Picard: [. . .] ténacité du dialecte et volatilisation de l’idiome étranger [. . .] Il ne s’agit donc pas du cas relativement simple d’une assimilation du néerlandais au français mais d’une assimilation de dialectes du néerlandais au français dans un contexte dialectal picard. Pooley (2006a) refines this claim by arguing that Flemish speakers shifted to what they perceived to be French but what is in fact a local vernacular variety with many dialectal (Picard) features. Evidence gathered in a traditional dialectological perspective (Carton, 1972) shows that a speaker from the traditional working-class area of Saint-Sauveur born in the late 19th century used a wider array of Picard features with greater consistency than a contemporary from Wazemmes. This newly assimilated area was perceived in a number of contemporary accounts as strongly Flemish. Following infrastructure developments in the 20th century the old Saint-Sauveur quarter was demolished and rebuilt, leaving Wazemmes as the core central working-class area of Lille, at least in popular perception. Indeed, according to the fictionalised memoirs of a local resident (Vindevogel, 1984: 26, 69), Wazemmes had become by the 1920s the perceived heartland of a highly picardised local vernacular. By that time new Flemish arrivals were seen as foreigners (cf. Van der Meersch, 1933: 141) often by Lillois with patronymics evoking (often recent) Flemish ancestry (Pooley, 2006a: 224). Despite their considerable numbers (Belgians constituted, for instance, the majority of the population of Roubaix in the 1870s and 1880s), the overall picture was one of fairly rapid assimilation, with the only lasting legacy to local vernacular French being a few lexical items but no indisputable phonological features. The feature that



7.4 Historical perspectives on the sociolinguistic consequences of migration

can be argued most cogently to have been reinforced by a significant Flemish presence is WFCD. Although a feature of Germanic languages, including Netherlandic, the presence (or strengthening) of WFCD in Lillois vernacular cannot be unambiguously attributed to the migration of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It could be ascribed to longerstanding contact between Romance and Germanic communities in a region having both linguistic and political borders, as indeed is the case for regionally marked varieties of French in Alsace-Lorraine (Pooley, 2006a). As WFCD is still present in Belgian varieties in nearby francophone areas such as Mons (Bauvois, 2001), it is at least likely that the feature gained prominence as a result of the presence of migrants from francophone Belgium as well as those from contiguous areas of the hinterland of Lille. It should be borne in mind that the adoption of this feature is most plausibly construed as an indicator of a shift away from Picard vernacular norms to local/regional vernacular French norms. WFCD is far from being a feature of all the dialects depicted in the ALPic atlas (Carton and Lebègue, 1989; 1998) and a number of indications suggest that it was in the early part of the 20th century characteristic of varieties perceived as French rather than Picard (e.g. Cochet, 1933, comparing the extremely conservative variety of the village of Gondecourt (WFCD-free) to that of the francofied variety of the nearby town of Seclin (WFCD present)). By the end of the 20th century the feature, which is not mentioned in the classic studies of français populaire (e.g. Frei, 1929; Bauche, 1946), came to be perceived as ‘not French’. For the interwar generations it was, however, a markedly feminine feature, suggesting that it was one to be adopted, and perhaps more broadly part of a variety (local vernacular French) to be taken up at the expense of Picard (or more markedly picardised French) (Section 7.2). Recent studies in perceptual dialectology in Lille suggest that Metropolitan French (MF) informants are more knowledgeable about and sensitive to Picard features than their contemporaries ‘issus de l’immigration’ (Pooley, 2004). The Flemish Belgians had no particular incentive to adopt specifically local vernacular features, but their socioeconomic status meant that they settled for the most part in poorer working-class areas where they associated with French people having these forms. The migrants were not only less sensitive to the social significance of local features but at least in the short term had less ready access to more standardised forms than the indigenous population. In the 19th century French was the language of culture and literacy in Flanders, and the Flemish migrants would have had greater incentive to acquire it than a standard variety of Netherlandic.2




In that perspective, it is not surprising that the Flemish migrants of the 19th and early 20th centuries abandoned their Netherlandic dialects relatively quickly and shifted to French, or at least to varieties they perceived as French, although these may well have been construed by many French people as patois. Their patois contained, however, fewer dialectal features than those of traditional speakers of local vernaculars. They thus contributed to the processes of convergence towards French, dialect levelling and koinéisation within Picard varieties, and certain areas where they settled came several decades later to be known as strongholds of patois. While there are clear similarities between the Italian migration into southern France and the Belgian in the north – poorly educated or illiterate people of mostly peasant stock crossing a porous frontier to settle in border regions close to their homeland – the points of contrast are not far to seek. Blanchet (2003) underscores the cultural affinity between Provençal-speaking Provence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the mainly Piedmontese migrants, whose language and culinary traditions were markedly similar. Moreover, this linguistic and cultural blending occurred at a time when Provence was becoming francofied, particularly through the introduction of compulsory primary education (Ferry Laws, 1881–86). Unlike Picard, Provençal was, in the latter part of the 19th century, enjoying a literary renaissance through the Félibrige, which Blanchet (2003: 9) suggests may have been a factor motivating Italian migrants to acquire it. On the other hand, the Provençaux readily italianised their speech to facilitate communication with Piedmontese speakers (Pasquini, 2000: 305) and indeed many informants in that study were hard put to distinguish between Provençal and Piedmontese. While the majority of the early Italian migrants came from Piedmont and Liguria, more came from Tuscany and Naples in the 20th century. In the interwar period, Provençal-dialetto code-mixing was widespread. As regards the acquisition of French, Roux (1970: 58–9) takes the view that Italian migrants of all regional origins needed to go through the intermediate stage of acquiring Provençal: un fait très important mérite d’être noté, valable pour tout le Var (et peut-être pour toute la Provence): [. . .] avant 1914 ou même 1930, les Italiens arrivant dans la région [. . .] apprenaient en même temps le dialecte local et le français; pour beaucoup même (d’origine surtout piémontaise) le provençal était un intermédiaire quasi obligatoire pour arriver au français. Tous les ordres ou conseils pour le travail étaient d’ailleurs donnés en dialecte [provençal].




As with Landrecies’ account of what occurred in Roubaix, the acquisition of a local vernacular proved to be an essential step in acceding to the mainstream language. Indeed, just as Blanchet argues emphatically that the Italian migrants strengthened and prolonged the everyday use of Provençal in Provence, so one can argue that people of Flemish extraction helped maintain Picard (albeit francofied) in the Nord. Both groups were accustomed to a situation where a dialect was used for informal local communication. The main linguistic legacy of the Italian presence in Provence is lexical, but the so-called italianisms came from various parts of Italy and Corsica3 and were probably assimilated into local vernaculars over a prolonged period. With regard to phonological levelling in French, a number of studies (Brun, 1931; Walter, 1982; Carton et al., 1983; Taylor, 1996; Pooley, 2007) refer to the influence of Provençal on regional varieties, but no feature, particularly in and around Marseille where the largest concentrations of Italians were to be found, is specifically attributed to possible Italian influence on the regional language. Whilst not wishing to downplay the differences between the two processes of migration described above, or the fact that the decline of Provençal as a social practice is several decades more recent than that of Picard in the Nord, both migrations were partly but by no means entirely made up of illiterate dialect speakers who assimilated into the lower strata of the local French society and adopted their linguistic habits, while at the same time promoting convergence towards more widespread varieties. The Provence accent in French unarguably is the most positively viewed both within and outside the region, while that of the Nord is highly stigmatised. That may be attenuated by the fact that, as will be seen in Section 7.5, an indicator of regional attachment has been shown to correlate closely with the use of regional French features and can cross ethnic boundaries in the Nord. Moreover, as was argued in Section 5.12, relatively favourable attitudes towards the Provence accent have not prevented its progressive abandonment by subsequent generations.

7.5 Urban youth vernaculars As with Blanchet’s study of Provence, most studies of youth vernacular have concentrated on lexis. The way in which perceptions of the phenomenon changed over the last two decades of the 20th century has been analysed by Boyer (2001: 77) who distinguishes three periods of media coverage of the phenomenon: in the 1980s, the press referred




to youth language as français branché or even le jeune before narrowing it down to certain underprivileged young people, and then by the mid-1990s, pushed it still further to the multi-ethnic and multilingual elements of the poorer communities, most of whom are of Maghrebian extraction. While media exaggeration and certain cinematic representations (e.g. La Haine, 1995) suggest the formation of a new dialect or dialects more or less incomprehensible to most of the population, the suggestion does not resist the scrutiny of accountable, contextualised fieldwork (Lepoutre, 1997: 430; Fagyal, 2004: 43). Both of these researchers studied a high-rise estate nicknamed Les 4000 in La Courneuve, a northern Parisian banlieue. Lepoutre’s work is ethnographic in approach and strongly recommends careful micro-sociolinguistic studies on language to complement his description of the multi-ethnic social world of adolescents, where Maghrebians constitute the largest migrant group. Faygal’s study of the lexis of adolescents in the same area in the early part of the current century fails to find convincing evidence of newdialect formation despite the subjects’ own perception that they have a particular way of speaking. With regard to phonology, Armstrong and Jamin (2002) have argued that the banlieues are the main source of vernacular innovation against a general backdrop of levelling towards a supralocal norm (Pooley, 2006b, 2007). The first variationist study of the Paris banlieue, that of Laks (1978) in Villejuif to the south of the capital, focussed on features like the dropping of liquids (/ö/ and /l/ after obstruents, as in [s A ˜ t] centre and [tab] table), and the reduction of linking phrases, like et puis to [epi], which can now be considered as compatible with supralocal norms, at least in informal styles. Laks’s fine-grained ethnographic analysis showed positive correlations between integration by male adolescents into a non-mainstream social network loosely centered on the local Maison pour tous in Villejuif and frequent phonological reduction. More recent studies have focussed on more clearly marked urban vernacular features, considering variants characteristic of traditional Parisian slang or titi parisien of pre-World War II times and of dialectal Arabic, e.g. Jamin (2005) in La Courneuve. The dual origin of the features diverging from the supralocal norm is shown by the vernacular forms noted by Armstrong and Jamin (2002), reproduced in Table 7.3. Features 1 to 5 in Table 7.3 cannot be specifically attributed to the input of migrants of either southern European or North African origin. Ethnically speaking, they can be categorised as white vernacular norms.




Social Factors: Class, Gender, Migration, Ideology and Language 265 Table 7.3 Divergent phonological features in La Courneuve (Armstrong and Jamin, 2002: 132) Example

1 Use of back /a/ in all contexts

la table [lA tAb] ; c’est grave [sE göAv]

2 /O/ raised towards /o/

la mort [lamoK] ; la police [lapolis]

3 Closing of /E/ to /e/ before word-final uvular approximant

ta mère [tAmeK] ; je suis vert [Sűi veK]

4 Raising and lengthening of /œ/ to [ø:] before /ö/

j’ai peur [Ze pø:K]

5 Affrication of dental and velar stops

/t/ realised as [tS] and /d/ as [dZ] before /i y w/ : tu dis [tSy di] ; toi [tSwA]; je veux dire que [ZvødZi:kS@:] /k/ realised as [kS] before /a A i E @ y œ ø/ and after nasal: qui [kSi]; donc [dÕkS].

6 Pharyngeal /r/

ta mère [tAmeKQ ]

They are characteristic of traditional vernacular and have been reported in a number of regional varieties. As previously stated, back /a/ is a socially split variant, characteristic of both regional vernacular and oldfashioned standard varieties. In Parisian and Normandy vernacular it is a small-set variant occurring in few words, whereas in the Nord– Pas-de-Calais and Brittany it can occur in open word-final syllables. What appears to be happening in La Courneuve is that some speakers are treating it as a purely phonetic variant and using it variably in all contexts. Pre-rhotic close /o/ and raised /e/ are also found in older and marginalised vernaculars, while the raising of /œ/ to [ø] before /ö/, although without lengthening, can be construed as a variable feature of the supralocal norm. Affrication after /k/ and /t/ is a feature that has been associated with Parisian vernacular for several centuries (cf. Rosset, 1911: 314), leaving only pharyngeal /r/ as perhaps a Maghreb feature. In this regard however, current perceptions, of which speakers are highly aware, are of greater import than historical accounts of which they are of course uninformed; it is perhaps the combination of these elements in a structured system that lends distinctiveness to the variety. For feature 5 and to a lesser degree features 1 and 6, Jamin, Trimaille and Gasquet-Cyrus (2006) argue that divergence from the supralocal norm is matched by convergence across pluri-ethnic (but Maghrebiandominated) areas of several cities. The use of back /a/ as a phonetic variant has been observed not only by Jamin in La Courneuve north



Feature

of Paris, but also by Trimaille (2003) in Chorier-Berriat, a multi-ethnic area of Grenoble. That said, only Jamin’s data reflect the multi-ethnic character of the area investigated through the choice of informants, Trimaille having elected to restrict his analysis to subjects of Maghrebian origin. Pharyngeal /r/ has been noted not only in Paris and Grenoble, but also in Perpignan by Pickles (2001). The findings of this latter study show the variant to be used by school pupils of Maghrebian origin considerably more than speakers of other ethnicities, although the Maghrebian informants were not from areas suffering particular social blight. The affrication of /t/ and /d/ has again been observed in both the Paris and Grenoble studies, to which may be added the perceptual approach of Gasquet-Cyrus (Jamin, Trimaille and Gacquet-Cyrus, 2006) who adduces convincing evidence that the feature is perceived by the Marseillais as characteristic of their fellow citizens of Maghrebian origin who live in the northern suburbs (quartiers nord, hence the term accent QN). In the Paris and Perpignan studies, all the variants proved to be minority features, used in fewer than half of possible cases by those who use them at all. In Grenoble, however, two of the three variants are strongly majority features for some speakers, who use them even in reading styles. Table 7.4 suggests that for the young people of various ethnicities in the northern Paris suburbs, affrication is an indicator, as it is used more by those of Maghrebian origin than metropolitan French (MF in the table) or members of other ethnic minorities, but there are no significant differences between reading and interview styles. For all groups, boys use affrication more than girls and adolescents and younger adults (aged 15–25) more than older adults (30–50). Table 7.5 shows that affrication is a significant minority variant for the younger age group immersed in street culture, while it is used only occasionally by the adults who have settled lives characteristic of Table 7.4 Affrication of dental and velar stops in two styles in La Courneuve (Jamin, 2005: 43) Ethnicity

MF parents Maghrebian parents Parents of other migrant origin

Interview style

Reading style

N

%

N

%

3,349 4,465 2,746

6.4 21.6 13.6

579 741 379

5.3 22.9 16.7




Social Factors: Class, Gender, Migration, Ideology and Language 267 Table 7.5 Affrication by style, age and gender in La Courneuve (Armstrong and Jamin, 2002: 133)

Males 15–25 Females 15–25 Males 30–50 Females 30–50

Reading styles

N

%

N

%

1,369 387 18 52

22.5 13.4 0.6 1.4

111 26 1 1

17.3 8.3 0.2 0.2

mainstream values, particularly employment and nuclear family. This is typical of the disavowal by most young people, once they leave school and enter the wider world, of the adolescent values they espoused so closely while at school in the banlieue (cf. Lepoutre, 1997). While there are some grounds for claiming that in multi-ethnic urban areas, where the Maghrebians are the largest migrant group, certain phonological features and possibly some lexical items are used more by young people of North African origin than their peers from other ethnicities, neither affrication nor pharyngeal /r/ are, generally speaking, majority features for their users. Indeed, affrication is a long-standing vernacular feature observed in such geographically distant places as the Pas-de-Calais (Hornsby, 2006b), western France (Wolf, 1987: 30; Gulyás, 2004: 74), Belgium (Hambye, 2005: 90), Canada (Walker, 1984: 90) and Réunion (Beniamino and Baggioni, 1993: 161) and most recently among middle-class speakers from Grenoble and in the public speech of politicians (Trimaille, forthcoming). Trimaille suggests, however, that the jeunes des quartiers affricate more frequently and with greater intensity. Apart from in Marseille, its perceptual salience is not particularly high, since it is not one of the features generally parodied, unlike pharyngeal /r/ and some prosodic features and lexis. Nor should the public attention directed at lexical items, as witnessed by coverage in the mainstream press and the publication of many dictionaries and glossaries, be interpreted as a sign of new-dialect formation. Lexicographical studies such as Goudaillier (2001) appear to assume a clear correlation betwen the use of certain terms and certain social characteristics (young, banlieue-dwelling, lower-class, ‘ethnic minority’), while making no attempt to compare the usage of young people with socially equivalent profiles or indeed more privileged contemporaries, particularly of MF background. In any event, youth vernaculars or verlan do not result in full bidialectalism, nor exclude mastery of a parler



Casual style


Je ne connais personne qui fasse des phrases entièrement en verlan. En général, tu as des mots et des expressions qui reviennent mais ça dépend à qui tu parles. Si je vais à la mairie ou que je parle à mon prof, je leur parle normalement New vernacular terms are part of an informal speech style and come to be widely shared, particularly if the items in question enjoy any longevity. Goudaillier (2001), quoting Décugis and Zemouri (1995: 176), hints at the possibility of sub-regional variation within Greater Paris, distributed according to greater concentrations of particular ethnic groups, for instance go in variation with meuf : il y a des expressions ou des mots qui existent dans un département mais pas dans un autre. Dans le 95, par exemple, pour dire meuf, on dit go. C’est surtout les blacks qui disent ça. Ou daron à Champigny (94), c’est le père. Goudaillier’s examples suggest further that various word-formation processes may be more prevalent in different cities. Curiously, innovative verlan seems to be strongly characteristic of Paris, whereas the urban youth of Lyon and Marseille favour other types of neologism. Although of some interest, this situation is far removed from the processes of newdialect formation described by Fox (2007) in her study of the English of young people of Bangladeshi origin in the East End of London, where she reports several innovative vowel features that are strongly associated with this migrant community. Lexis quite manifestly is superficial compared with pronunciation. The work of Pooley (1996, 2000, 2004, 2009) in Lille covers both old, decaying inner-city industrial areas (les courées de Roubaix) and post1960s high-rise estates (Rouges-Barres, Marcq-en-Barœul; Trois-Ponts, Roubaix). The data collected in the early 1980s concentrate on MF subjects and show the vitality of dialectal features among older speakers and the emergence of (non-exclusive) regional French features, particularly back /a/ in open final syllables and the use of open /o/ in closed syllables in words where a close variant predominates in supralocal French, e.g. côte [kOt]. Studies of past and contemporary migration (e.g. Pooley 2006a) show that migrants have mostly settled in poorer working-class



normal, as the following informant observed, cited by Décugis and Zemouri (1995: 73):

areas, with high levels of interaction with locals of comparable social background as a result. Maghrebian immigration in the second half of the 20th century has given rise to relatively high concentrations of North Africans who generally form the majority of the ethnic-minority population in certain multi-ethnic areas, either in old inner-city quarters like Lille-Sud or les barres et les tours of the 1960s and 1970s, such as the Trois-Ponts in Roubaix. In popular perception history can be said to be repeating itself as the better-off sections of the community (for the greater part MF) leave the undesirable older industrial areas for better-quality housing in the green periurban communes within easy commuting distance, creating wide disparities of ethnic composition between these and the old industrial heartlands (Lille-Roubaix-Tourcoing) where Maghrebiandominated multi-ethnic communities flourish. This has given rise to certain sociolinguistic phenomena, at least in the popular perception, notably reverse assimilation which sees young MF people using Arabic words (cf. Rampton, 1995). The Marcq-en-Barœul study (Pooley, 2000) showed the vitality of two marked regional features, back /a/ [sA] ça and open /o/ [kOt] côte, in an otherwise more or less completely depicardised vernacular in the mid1990s. Secondly, the data showed strongly marked gender and ethnic differences, with back /a/ emerging as a white masculine marker, while among the female subjects there was little difference in the behaviour of the MF and Maghrebian girls. Indeed, the greater use of back /a/ among the Maghrebians by the girls compared to the boys was interpreted as being indicative of their greater integration into their gender peer group. The female group manifested a heartening level of interethnic harmony, whereas the male group showed signs of interethnic rivalry and conflict. As an indication, this is one of the few situations where respondents manifested a positive value for a ‘Le Pen Index’, which involved the subjects’ expressing some degree of support for the Front National leader as president or approval of those who vote for him and his party. Curiously too, style-shifting patterns for open /o/ were completely reversed for the two ethnic groups, with the MF adolescents showing the predicted pattern of greatest use of [kOt]-type forms in Group Style (spontaneous conversation) as opposed to Word List, Reading Passage and Interview, while the Maghrebians used the greatest number of [O] tokens in Word List and the least in Group Style, suggesting that they perceived forms like [kOt] as standard. A Regional Loyalty Index (RLI) (Pooley, 1996, 2004) based on responses about living in the region, the people of the region and their preferred choice of residence in adulthood, proved




sensitive to ethnicity with only French subjects achieving the highest possible value. Among the MF teenagers a high RLI value correlated significantly with frequent use of back /a/. Analysis of the Lille-Sud corpus (Pooley, 2009) recorded a decade later, while showing partial confirmation of the Marcq-en-Barœul findings, reveals a number of indicators of levelling. The subjects are an ethnically mixed class of thirteen (seven of MF origin and six of Maghrebian background, including one of mixed parentage). In school the class showed high levels of interethnic harmony; 71% of the pupils (counting the girl of mixed parentage in each of her guises) named at least one friend of different ethnic background among their three best friends at school (Interethnic Friendship Index at School – IFIS) with half points awarded for any name after the first three. Outside school (Interethnic Friendship Index Outside School – IFIO), interethnic friendships were considerably fewer. In both cases, claimed interethnic friendships were more frequent than inter-gender friendships. In contrast to the Marcq-en-Barœul group, no informants manifested the slightest positive reaction when questioned over Le Pen and the National Front. The Lille-Sud study suggests that back /a/ is somewhat recessive compared to the mid-1990s, whereas open /o/ continues to thrive. Strongly backed variants of /a/ in the region of [2] or [A] were a strongly minority feature, compared to the more generalised front realisation [a]. On many occasions a kind of intermediate form was used, with some degree of backing but not fully back, transcribable as [5]. Comparison of the two corpora (Table 7.7) shows the Lille-Sud group used strongly backed /a/ only in a minority of cases and significantly less than the Marcq-en-Barœul informants, even if tokens transcribed as [5] were included, as shown by the bracketed figures. Table 7.7 suggests too that phonological context is of considerable importance, with strong /a/ backing significantly favouring word-final and phrase-final (pre-pausal) position. Moreover, the variant shows clear signs of a phonologically arbitrary lexicalisation to a small range of lexical items, particularly ça and là which are the most crucial loci because of their high frequency. Open /o/, on the other hand, was used with greater consistency in the 2005 data than in those of 1995 and indeed it is a clear majority form in the corpus as a whole. Some individual items are invariant, such as rôle [öOl] and gauche [goS]. Although the open variant was slightly more frequent in phrase-final position, this is not significant as was the case of /a/ backing. While the patterns of stylistic variation are similar overall, the decreased frequency of back /a/ has the effect of compressing the




Social Factors: Class, Gender, Migration, Ideology and Language 271 Table 7.6 Style shift in use of back /a/ and open /o/ (Marcq-en-Barœul, 1995; Lille-Sud, 2005) Marcq-en-Barœul Back /a/

Lille-Sud

Open /o/

Back /a/

Open /o/

Word List

19%

39%

7%

49%

Reading Passage

18%

39%

9%

38%

Interview

24%

39% 4%

74%

14%

77%

Group Conversation word-final Group Conversation word-final, phrase-final

41%

53%

Table 7.7 Use of back /a/ and open /o/ by gender and ethnicity (Group Conversation) (Marcq-en-Barœul, 1995; Lille-Sud, 2005) Gender

Boys Girls

MF 1995

Maghrebians 1995

Back /a/

Open /o/

Back /a/

Open /o/

57% 41%

62% 39%

14% 39%

50% 27%

MF 2005

Boys Girls

Maghrebians 2005

Back /a/

Open /o/

Back /a/

Open /o/

22% 5%

74% 58%

20% 6%

90% 17%

variation over a very narrow range, while the opposite is the case for open /o/, where the high frequency in conversational style stretches the range. Table 7.7 shows apparently classic gender correlations for the MF subjects in 1995 and 2005. For the Maghrebians the classic SGP in 1995 was clearly reversed for back /a/, where only the girls behaved similarly to their French peers. For open /o/, the apparently orthodox gender patterns for both ethnicities have to be weighed against the fact that the Maghrebians appear to perceive the standard and vernacular variants differently, in which case the Maghrebian girls’ scores could be interpreted as more highly vernacular than those of their male counterparts. The 2005 data for back /a/ suggest that gender overrides ethnicity and that it is a masculine rather than an MF male feature, albeit at



Style

a decreased level of frequency. Open /o/ is a majority feature for all MF subjects, although the males’ score is significantly higher than that of the females, but the difference is dwarfed by the huge difference between the Maghrebian boys, for whom it is a strong majority variant (90%), compared to the girls, for whom it is clearly a minority variant (17%). In fact the Maghrebian girls reverse the pattern of style shifting for both variants, using them most in word-list style (83% for open /o/). As regards the Regional Loyalty Index, a maximum index value was found to correlate significantly with greater use of both vernacular variants in both corpora, the main difference being that in the Marcqen-Barœul data only MF subjects gave responses corresponding to the highest possible index value, whereas in the Lille-Sud study, a high RLI index value crossed ethnic boundaries. In contrast, interethnic friendship indices, whether in or outside school, proved to be poor predictors of heavy use of back /a/ and open /o/, except that a nil value tended to correspond with the highest rates of vernacular use. A further indicator of interethnic harmony was knowledge of Arabic among MF subjects. Only one boy scored positively in this respect, and his scores were below the mean for males for both variables. On the other hand, a reworking of the friendship data to produce an interethnic index of popularity among classmates correlated significantly with high frequencies of vernacular use. By and large, interethnic harmony favours levelling, although attenuation of both interethnic and intergender differences (Billiez, Krief and Lambert, 2003) means that such differences as remain take on greater significance. This latter study shows that statistically slight intergender differences in interaction4 are amplified in the perceptions of participants of both sexes, who see boys’ usage as markedly more vernacular than that of girls. Moreover, boys identify with vernacular norms more readily than girls. As in Section 7.3, where it was argued that social class was a more significant factor than gender, it is arguable that gender overrides ethnicity in situations of interethnic harmony, since use of the vernacular, however defined, seems to be a male prerogative among the lower social classes. In situations of hostility, real or perceived, both MF and ethnic-minority speakers, particularly males, may claim their prerogative as gatekeepers of the counter-norm. Billiez, Krief and Lambert (2003: 183) describe the perceived stereotypes of the somewhat effete bourges (MF) and the more stereotypically masculine racailles (Maghrebian). Both ethnicities have the competence to use ethnically suitable forms such as Arabic or regional features. In Marcq-en-Barœul, the use of regional features, such as long close /o/ as in connais [ko:ne] or




Roger [öo:Ze] by MF boys (Pooley, 1996: 291) can plausibly be interpreted as forming part of a strategy to exclude their classmates of migrant background. Such reactions appear not to be generalised but may certainly be fostered by certain friendship groups. More generally, rather than any new dialect emerging, greater social meaning is invested in a narrower range of phonetic differences, supplemented by lexical innovation, but here descriptions of the social patterns of distribution have hitherto proved lacking in rigour.

7.6 Concluding remarks While there remains considerable variability in European varieties of French, the degree of levelling demonstrable through comparison of oral data over the 20th century is by any measure considerable, and arguably greater than in any historically multilingual parts of the ‘old continent’.5 This applies particularly to the regional dimension of variation, where the historical Oïl areas, with some notable exceptions such as the Nord– Pas-de-Calais, now seem to show little distinctive variation that would be readily recognised by ordinary francophones, even if careful linguistic investigation reveals specific features. It may be that Brittany and Alsace are also exceptions, particularly the latter, but convincing recent evidence is lacking and as far back as World War II (Martinet, 1945) middle-class speakers claimed few distinctive characteristics, if any. The increased recognition of regional languages may perhaps cause speakers to invest their linguistic identity in the ancestral tongues rather than in specific ways of speaking French. In the south, audibly regional accents are still much more respectable, and in Provence informants have been shown to perceive their way of speaking as preferable in some respects even to Parisian pronunciation. That conceded, evidence of levelling in southern France is considerable, particularly among educated young people, and ordinary ‘judges’ are hard put to discern sub-regional differences even among older speakers. In Belgium and Switzerland, a number of old-fashioned standard distinctions persist strongly, and certain historically vernacular features remain compatible with public usage among middle-class speakers – WFCD in Belgium is the best documented example, but this seems in principle to apply equally to the phonetic use of back /a/ in Switzerland. Greater mobility and thus international contact among the best-educated speakers clearly favours advergence towards French norms, although internal linguistic markets retain some value, and in




the middle ranks of society so-called old-fashioned standard features are solidly maintained. The picture we have of variable pronunciation has undoubtedly been distorted by the prevalence, indeed until quite recently the dominance, of perceptual studies, which have tended to exaggerate the perceived vitality of older and stereotypical varieties. More recent behavioural studies strongly suggest however that while marked regiolectal and sociolectal varieties have flourished principally among the lower classes, and to some extent still do, increased social levelling has reduced the differences between the usage of people from other social groups, while in the collective memory these continue to be defined by terms which seem less and less suitable in a post-industrial society pervaded in numerous ways by individualism. While studies like that of Armstrong and Boughton (1998) suggest that ordinary subjects can reliably identify the social origins of speakers when invited to do so in no doubt over-simplified binary terms, like working and middle class, other research, such as Hansen’s (2000) and Hambye’s (2005), point to a quite ample range of stylistic variation among educated speakers, compared to their less-well-educated peers. It seems that a generation has now grown up confident in their mastery of the reference variety, but happy to use a small range of vernacular pronunciation features for stylistic effect, supplemented by lexical differences. This reinforces the notion of the diglossic or quasi-diglossic nature of contemporary French, if by these terms is meant a situation where style variation is more important than social. This presupposes a state of affairs that sees most variable features as available to all speakers, such that they become ‘more a feature of register than of social dialect’ (Lodge, 2004: 247). Lodge’s remarks bear upon informal vocabulary but they seem to apply to pronunciation too. In this hypothesis the loss of regional pronunciation forms, which by definition are not available to all, has been largely replaced by widespread features like mute-e and liaison, the stylistic value of which is reinforced by universal and still quite highly normative education. In social terms the demographic dominance of the median classes means that the majority of speakers seek to sound neither too pointu nor too plouc. For most French speakers the distinction between /œ/ ˜ and /˜ E/ will be felt to be too pointu, and it may be either too pointu or too plouc to distinguish /a/ from /A/, depending on the region or lexical items concerned. In general it is certainly plouc to use dialect-influenced forms, although highly marked forms of regional languages are enjoying reinvigorated valorisation, in most cases without any accompanying




adoption as social practice. Certainly the term plouc evokes the rural past of France, and as Lodge (2004: 14) has pointed out, very few French terms exist to refer to urban vernaculars, in contrast to those current in UK English (Cockney, Scouse, Geordie, etc.). Indeed, it is sometimes said that the very term accent connotes for many French speakers a rural accent. While the French language remains a respected, indeed a totemic institution, and is certainly less vehemently decried than other social institutions, the reference variety has undergone some degree of levelling through simplification, exemplified by the loss of distinctions such as /œ/-/˜ ˜ E/ and /a/-/A/, and some destandardisation as described by Willemyns (2007), seen most notably in the middle-class adoption of fronted /o/. It remains to be seen whether further markers of destandardisation will emerge; the only candidate seems at the moment to be affrication of /t, d/. The ideology of the standard, along with the dominance of Paris in every aspect of public affairs as well as in demographic weight, has favoured levelling beyond the Île-de-France, as Map 5.4 is designed to illustrate. What is more, as Singy (1996) has rightly observed, Paris remains the main source of linguistic innovation, as in the case of pre-pausal schwa, seemingly the most recent variable feature to emerge. In Belgium and Switzerland, the transmission of this ideology and the influence of Paris have undoubtedly been weaker, despite widespread concerns about correctness. The persistence of old-fashioned standard forms is now plainly under threat, even in the public domain, as is that of vernacular regional forms. Belgian and Swiss speakers may feel some pride in the way that they speak but the prestige they derive from it is largely confined to the internal linguistic market, where valorised sub-regional differences are being eroded. Internationally, both Belgians and Swiss recognise the extraterritoriality of the reference variety and are generally aware that their distinctive traits are hardly held in high regard by the French. Compared to Quebec, the affirmation of prestige national norms in Belgium and Switzerland is weak, although stylistically appropriate practices, despite clear indications of levelling, retain some vitality and internal valorisation. While as variationists we applaud a plurality of norms and the encouragement of francophones of all regions to express ownership of their language through its variable use, we can hardly deny that the ideology of the standard and the cultural dominance of France, although not unquestioned and in some respects undermined, still face no serious challenge, particularly in Europe.




With regard to the historical contact varieties, the ideological position of France in particular has softened, according some recognition as languages to traditional dialects no longer perceived as a threat to national unity (Section 2.10). Switzerland, in the spirit of the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, has chosen not to follow this initiative, while Belgium, riven by ethnolinguistic conflict, dare not contemplate it. The Belgian and Swiss approaches may paradoxically have the effect of investing a greater identity value in their regional (effectively national) forms of French, as the Belgian francophones and Romands affirm their identity as francophones within federal nations where their Flemish and Alemanic compatriots are dominant. The cultural hegemony of France, although unarguably pervasive, seems by contrast less of a preoccupation, yet the revalorisation of the regional languages has had the rather perverse effect of promoting artificial normalised varieties which never were spoken historically. These have the potential to alienate native speakers of the varieties acquired through family or community and now used as the principal, if now largely symbolic, focus of the linguistic aspects of regional identity; they are capable too of divesting further the regiolectal varieties of French of their symbolic role. These normalised varieties are confined to small, self-conscious cultural circles (e.g. associations patoisantes), while social practices which are perhaps less subject to conscious reflection become less regionally differentiated. The major exception to all this in France is the south, although as we have already stated, meridional varieties too are undergoing considerable degrees of levelling.

Notes 1. Equivalent to Special Needs. 2. Eloy et al. (2003) suggest greater awareness of the differences between Picard and French on the part of migrants from various parts of the picardophone area. Their study is purely epilinguistic and considers only well-established migrants. 3. This is not to deny that Corsican speakers perceive their language as distinct from Italian. 4. Perceived interactional distinctions, such as use of swear words, may or may not correlate with use of variable features of pronunciation. 5. Except for Iceland, whose historic uniformity is described by Trudgill (1986).




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Aachen, 67 ABN (algemeen beschaafd nederlands), 39–40 accents, viii, 78, 82–3, 100–204 and levelling, viii, 100–49 in Belgium, viii, 100, 126–38 in France, viii, 23, 100–25 in Switzerland, viii, 100, 138–49 acts of identity, 4, 288 address forms, 93–6 see also informalisation, pronouns advergence, 10, 39, 66, 98, 140–1, 145–6, 148, 179, 237–8, 254, 273, affrication, xvi, 110–11, 167–8, 174–5, 224–5, 265–7, 275 age, 2, 4, 82 and affrication, xvi, 267 and consonantal variants, xiii, 191 and alveolar and uvular variants, xiv, 220–1 and educational achievement in France, x, 55 and pronoun use, 94–5 and SAVs, xv, 233 and schwa realisation, xv, 234–5 and vowel use, 107 intergenerational changes, xiii, 37, 93–4, 97, 106, 109, 143, 159, 179–80, 184, 212, 251 rates of WFCD in Conversation task, xiv, 229 Aisne, the, 22 Aix-en-Provence, xiii–xiv, 124, 187, 194, 197–9, 288 Marseille-Aix-en-Provence, 15, 99n.3 nasal vowel realisations, xiii, 197 vowel realisations, xiii, 198–9 Algeria, 77–8 Algerians, 75, 91 Alltagssprache (generalised colloquial standard), 40

Alpes, 22, 105, 190–1, 201, 204, 283 Alsace, 22, 76, 160–1, 163–5, 181, 203n.1, 230, 273 Alsace-Lorraine, 11, 20, 152–3, 158–9, 261 Alsatian, 22, 37, 181, alveolar, xiv, 109, 178, 184, 197, 218–20, 220–1, 232 Amsterdam, 12, 14, 39 Ancien Régime, the, 21, 103, 279 Anglo-American, 46, 59, 82, 84, 93, 95–6, 222 Antwerp, 13–14, 48, 213, Appenzell, 32 approximant, 109, 165, 167, 183, 211, 232, 265 Arabic, 30, 253, 264, 269, 272, Argentina, 91 Asians, 75–6 aspiration (phonetics), 164–5, 181 assimilation, 18, 27, 78, 97, 109, 176, 195, 211, 260, 269, 293 Asturian, 37, 290 Austria, 9, 11, 26, 31, 34, 38–9, 42–3, 75, 78, 91, 203n.9 Auvergnat (Auvergne), 22, 183–4 Barcelona, 41, 284 Barère (1755–1841), 22–3, 104–5 Basel, 69 Basque country, the, 11, 41, 187, 189, 192–3, 195, 197, 258, 278 language, 22, 37, 103, 281, 293 Basse-Normandie, 76, 284 BBC English, 136 see also English Belgian French, xii, 133 National Day, 30, 87 pronunciation, 12

297



Index

Belgium accents, viii, 100, 126–38 economic indicators, x, 28 francophone, 11, 16, 19 French-speaking, 12 Flemish Belgians, 11 foreigners, xi, 76 GDP, x, 16–17 gender equality, xi, 72 German-speaking Belgians, 11 Gini index, x, 53 language change, ix, 8–43, 227–36 locations of recent sociolinguistic studies, xiv, 218 linguistic and territorial divisions, xvii, 29 linguistic levelling, viii–ix, 205–48 as peripheral within French-speaking space, 20 population, x, 27 language ability, x, 30 working, x, 47 prestigious pronunciations, viii, 126–38 prosperity (relative), x, 49 sociolinguistic situation, 1 standardisation, 8–43 territorial history of, 26 Bellinzona, 69 Berber, 30 Berne, 32, 69–70, 87 Besançon French, xiii, 181–3, 293–4 bidialectalism, 11, 42, 156, 267 Biel-Bienne, 11, 69–70, 140 bilabial, 193–4, 197, 202 bilingualism, xvii, 11, 28–30, 37, 42, 105, 107, 157, 205–6 Blocher, Christoph, 34, 77 Bordeaux, 15, 59, 99n.3, 200 Borinage, the, ix, xiv, 52, 67, 218–22 Boston, 14 see also USA bourgeois, 57, 68, 71, 95, 102, 105, 127 bourgeoisie, 25, 42, 51, 115, 130, 136 Brazil, 53, 91 Breton, 22, 103, 155, 159, 161, 163–4, 175–7 see also non-Romance languages

Brittany, viii, 11, 22, 76, 175–80 Bruges, 13 Brussels, ix, 14, 48, 76, 79, 227–35 Belgian nationals in, xiv, 206 bilinguals, xiv, 11, 27–31, 208 Bruxelles-Capitale, 28, 66, 76 Bruxellois, 14 economic indicators, x, 28, ethnolinguistic affiliation, 19 of 19th-century French and Dutch speakers, x, 19 Parliament of Bruxelles-Capitale region, 28 population, 15–16 speakers, xii, xv, 132, 232 vernacular, ix, 205–11 Buddhism, 92–3 Burgundy, xii, 22, 26, 31, 143–4, 160, 163–4, 169, 181, 201 Caen, 16, 169, 177 Cambodia, 92 Cambrai, 13 Canada, 35, 131, 141, 267, 278, 288 capital (Bourdieu conception of), 56–7 Castillian, 37 Catalan, 22, 37, 41, 201 Catalonia, 41, 195, Catholicism, 34, 87, 91, 177 Central-Place System, 12–13 see also Network System, history of urban Europe (model) Centre-Periphery model, x, 12–15 Cergy-Pontoise, 64 Champenois, 38, 212 Charleroi-La Louvière-Mons, 67–8 Christianity, 34, 77, 90–3, 137 Christliche Volkspartei, 91 see also political parties class, social, ix, xii, 2, 4–5, 7, 50–8, 61, 83, 85, 96–7, 102–7, 249–53 and gender, 71 classification, 53–4 consciousness, 42



298 Index

middle-class, viii, xii, xiii, 5, 6, 14, 31, 36, 40, 51–2, 63, 71, 79, 82, 94, 110, 106, 132, 160, 188, 190, 194, 199–202, 213, 216, 267, 273, 275 and schwa deletion, xiii, 196 and stylistic variables, xiv, 225 lower classes, 24, 26, 86 upper-class, 23, 25, 36, 51 variation, 6 working-class, xii, xiv, 5–6, 36, 40–1, 51–2, 61, 71, 63–4, 96–7, 110–11, 151, 208, 213, 230, 251, 255, 260–1, 268, 292 Clermont-Ferrand, 16, 185, 203n.8 clothing see under dress Cockney, 36 see also English code-mixing, 206, 262, 278 code-switching, 206, 209, 278 Committee of Public Safety, 22 see also Barère communes, 15, 23, 26–7, 29, 59, 60–1, 66–7, 219, 251, 269 Communist Party, the, 86 see also political parties consonantal features in regional varieties, xiii, 164 phonemes, xi, 109, variants, xiii, 191–2 conversation, xiv–xvi, 225, 233–5, 271 corpus/corpora, 114, 119, 171, 196, 198, 208, 227–8, 230, 257, 270, 272 corpus-planning, 23, 74, 101 Corsica, 22, 25, 76, 263, 276n.3 Courtrai, 13, 59, 68 Côte d’Azur, 22 covert prestige, 14, 58, 105, 123, 127, 181 see also overt prestige, prestige norm cultural hegemony, 249, 276 Czech Republic, 75 DATAR, 59, 64 Declaration of Human Rights, 24 dedialectalisation, 5, 38, 170, 246, 289

299

Deferre Law (1982), 22 Definition tasks, xiv, 225 Délégation Générale à la Langue Française (DGLF), 38 denasalisation, 182 Denmark, 9–10, 35, 40, 42, 53, 60, 75, 81 dental, 109, 160, 167, 193, 197, 202, 265–6, 295 stops, xvi, 266 départements, 21–2, 26, 63, 77, 187, 283 depicardisation, 169–70 desocialisation, 38 destandardisation, 35, 39–40, 123, 352, 275, 285 devoiced see under voiceless diaeresis, 134, 136, 189–90, 200, 203, 216, 224–5, 238 dialect, 34, 41–2, 103 base, 10–12 constellations in Europe (standard), x, 9 divergence of, 8 regional, 11 shift, 10 ‘dialect mix’, xiii, 171 dialectological methods, 10, 45, 169, 260 diaglossia, 9, 10–12, 35, 37, 39, 43 see also vernacular post-diaglossia, 9 dialectology, 53, 152, 155, 201, 207, 261, 280, 290 diglossia, 9, 11–12, 21, 26, 35–6, 38–9, 43, 205–6, 259, 282 medial-diglossia, 9–10 post-diglossia, 9 post-spoken diglossia, 10 spoken, 10 Dijon, 16, 181, 295 diphthong(s), 163–4 diphthongisation, 171, 180, 182, 184, 207, 209–10, 214–15, 238, 243 dress, 89–90, 97, 99 Dominant Southern Pattern (DSP), 188–9, 192, 202–3 Dunkerquois, 11



Index

Duruy report, the, 23 Dutch, 1, 11, 19, 26, 28, 30–1, 35–6, 39, 43, 76, 207, 211, 285, 296 Druon, Maurice, 74 Eastenders, 36 see also Cockney; Garnett, Alf Edict of Nantes (1685), 33 education level, 50, 85, 96–7 and frequency of use of variants, xiii, 173, 220–1 and SAVs, xv, 233 and schwa realisation, xv, 234 and vowel usage, xiii, 173 four-point scale, xiv, 222 and rates of WFCD in Conversation task, xiv, 229 education system and parents’ profession, x, 56 in Belgium, 71–2, 78–9, 90–1 in England, 25 in France, viii, 20, 24–5, 71–2, 79, 90–2, 105, 120–3 in Switzerland, 35, 71–2, 80, 90–1 policy, 79–80 post-compulsory, 8 elision, 105, 109, 111, 164–5, 209–11 endoglossic, 9 see also diglossia, exoglossic England, 11, 40–1 Birmingham, 41 Lancaster, 40 Leeds-Bradford, 41 Liverpool, 41, 89 London, 14–15, 40–1, 89 Manchester, 41 Norwich, 54 Tyneside, 41, 196 West Midlands, 41 English, language, 1, 5, 11, 19–20, 30, 37, 40–1, 43, 52, 78–80, 95–6, 103, 109, 136, 153, 155, 203, 203n.9, 254–5, 268, 275, 279, 285, 287, 290–1, 295 see also BBC English, Cockney, Estuary English, Received

Pronunciation, United Kingdom people, 41 Estuary English, 40 see also English ethnicity, 2, 4, 7, 249–76 and vowel realisation, xvi, 271 ethnographic approach, 264, 280 ethnolinguistic conflict, 37 European Commission, 87 European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages, 25, 37–8, 276 European Economic Community, 49 European Union, the, 35, 73, 76, 88, 98 Eurostat, x, 28 Evolène, 37, 237, 289, 291 Évry, 64 exception culturelle, 1 exception française, 8–9, 12, 21, 43 exoglossic, 9, 11 fieldwork methodology, 82, 107, 160, 176, 203n.7, 205–7, 239, 250, 257, 264 Finland, 53, 72, 75, 81 Ferry Laws (1881–86), 24 Flanders, 9, 13, 16, 26–30, 38–9, 43, 48, 52, 75–7, 86, 127, 159, 161, 164, 172, 206–7, 215, 261 Meuse, the, 13 Scheldt (Escaut), 13 Verkavelingsvlaams, 40 Flemish, 22, 24, 26, 29–31, 38, 42, 48, 66, 78 background of speaker(s), xiv, 19, 208 Council, 28 formant frequency analysis, xv, 255 Fourastié, Jean, 47 français courant (stylistically neutral usage), 40, 110, 135 français familier (informal styles of standard speakers), 40, 121 français populaire (generalised vernacular, Parisian origin), 40, 111, 158, 162, 165–6, 189, 261, 283



300 Index

France accents, viii, 100–25 bilingualism in the autochtonous languages of, xvii, 157 eastern regions, viii, 180–3 educational achievement, x, 55 education system, viii, 120–3 GDP, x, 17 gender equality, xi, 72 Gini index, x, 53 language change, 6, 8–43 linguistic levelling, viii–ix, 150–204 see also levelling myth of the so-called Hexagon, 21, 25 National Front, 77, 86 non-southern, ix, 185–6 northern, 9, 26, 41, 77 population (working), x, 47 prosperity (relative), x, 49 reference pronunciation, viii, xi, 101–11 sociolinguistic situation, 1 southern, ix, xvii, 108, 186–204 standardisation, 8–43 Francophone area(s), vii, x, 1, 8, 10, 13, 15, 35 background, xii, 133 community Parliament, 28 Europe, 10, 12 major urban areas, xvii, 62 Francophonie Nord, viii, 73, 125–6 see also Quebec Francoprovençal, 12, 139, 144, 158, 248n.4 substrate, ix, 236–9 see also Suisse romande Franco-Prussian War, 20 free variation, 199 French Academy, 73–4, 101, 126 government, 37 phonemic inventory, 106–7, 109, 160, 210 -speaking population in francophone cantons and part-cantons, x, 32 Standard acquisition of, 120–3

301

attitudes towards, 246 emergence of, 10 features of, 12, 82, 135 162, ideology of, 100–5 regional, 11 use of, 18, 34, 117, 143, 163, 186, 190 perceived best and worst, xii, 131 see also Francoprovençal, Oïl Freiburg-im-Breisgau, 69 Fribourg, 32, 69–70, 143–5, 237–8, 240 fricative, 109, 164, 166, 183, 195, 200, 210–11, 224, 229, 230, 232 Frisia, 39 fronting, xv, 108–11, 168, 193, 203, 216, 254, 255, 277 Galician, 37 Garnett, Alf, 36 Gascon, 22, 189–93, 201, 203 GDP, comparative, x, 17 geographical distribution and schwa realisation, xv, 235 Gembloux, ix, xiv, xv, 227–35, 229–30, 232, 234 gender, ix, 4, 7, 249, 253–60 and affrication, xvi, 267 and the use of alveolar/uvular variants, xiv, 221 and educational achievement in France, x, 55 and linguistic mutation, 97 and rates of WFCD in Conversation task, xiv, 230 and schwa deletion, xiii, 196 and stylistic variables, xiv, 225 and vowel realisation, xvi, 271 changing roles, vii, 70–4 equality, xi, 46, 72, 101 feminisation, 72–4, 100, 127, 279, 290 heterosexuality, 82, 92 homosexuality, 92–3 sex as a demographic attribute, 2 Geneva, ix, 14–16, 19, 32, 68–70, 73, 76, 93, 102, 139, 141, 143–6, 237–41, 243–4, 283, 287, 293, 295–6 Geneva-Annemasse, 59, 70, 98



Index

Genoa, 14 see also Italy German, 11, 20, 27, 30, 32, 41–3 Alsatian, 22 Frankish dialects, 11, 22, 38 germanic languages, 8 High German, 11, 42 Standard German, 38 germanophone(s), 11, 27–8, 32, 73, 81 German-speaking areas in Belgium, 1, 11, 27–9, 35, 49, 214 in Europe, 9–10 in France, 1, 20, 25, 49 in Switzerland, 1, 32, 35, 49, 52, 77, 80 Germany, 34, 36, 38–9, 41–2, 48–9, 60, 72, 75, 78, 81, 90–2, 95, 97 Ghent, 13, 213 Gini index see under Belgium, France, Switzerland glide, 109, 134, 197, 202, 211, 216, 224, 229, 238 globalisation, 46, 80, 295 government of the National Convention, 21, 104 Greek, 30 Grégoire, Abbé (1750–1831), 22–3, 104, 148n.2, 214, 234, 284 Grenoble, 76, 99n.3, 101, 266–7, 284, 289 Grisons, 32 Hague, the, 39 Harmel Report (1958), 27 haute bourgeoisie, 25, 51, 102 headscarf affair (affaire du foulard), 77 historical linguistics, 3 historico-sociolinguistics, 9 history of urban Europe (model), 12 see also Network System, Central-Place System hypercephalic, vii, 12 ideolect, 162, 176 ideology, ix, 249, 273–6 dominant, 82 Jacobin, 103 of Revolutionary regime, 23, 103

of Standard French, 101–5, 121, 252, 275, 290 one-language-one-nation, 23–4 Île-de-France region, xvii, 22, 36, 63–4, 76, 161, 163–4, 169, 275 imitation, 3 see also mimicry Indo-China, 92 see also Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia industrialisation, 39, 41, 48, 153, 260 informalisation, 4, 6, 89, 93–4, 96, 100, 110, 115 informality, 1, 8, 85, 98 in-group, 4 see also out-group insertion phenomena, viii, 111–20 internationalisation, vii, 46, 78–80, 88 intonation, 120, 151, 181–2, 231 Ireland, 41, 75, 81 see also Northern Ireland Islam see under Muslims Issac, 21 Italian, language, 30, 32, 35, 37, 77 people, 49, 75–6, 78 Italy, 9, 14, 25, 42, 49, 60, 72, 75, 81, 91, 263, 278, 291 Japan, 53 Jews, 34, 87–8 Jospin, Lionel, 25, 73 Jura, 32, 73, 87, 141, 143–5, 180, 237, 277, 288 Jutland, 41 labialisation, 134, 239 Labov, William, 2–3, 45, 53, 58, 110, 223, 252–3, 287 Labovian method, 1, 222 see also variationist method Labovian programme, 2, 6 Martha’s Vineyard, 45, 176–7 La Chaux-de-Fonds, 69–70 La Courneuve, xv, 265, 267 Lakes/Lac Léman, 33–4 La Louvière, 68 language and nation, vii, 20–5



302 Index

language change, vii in Belgium, 7–43, 26 in France, 7–43 in Switzerland, 7–43, 31 Langue d’Oc, 22 Languedoc-Roussillon, 22, 76 Langue d’Oïl, 10 La Nouvelle Héloïse, 19 Laos, 92 Latin, 9–10, 21 Latin American, 43 Lausanne, 14, 16, 68–70 see also Vaud, the Lavisse, 21 LEGA, 77 levelling, vii, 3–6, 8, 273–6 and accents, viii, 100–49 linguistic levelling, 8, 100 dialect levelling, 5, 10, 105, 262, 277, 286, 293, 296 in Belgium and Switzerland, viii–ix, 205–48 of regional varieties in France, viii–ix, 150–204 social levelling, 1, 4–6, 8, 44–100 lexical distribution, 163, 169 item, xii, xv, 107, 109, 128, 135, 145, 162, 165, 179, 182, 209, 231, 240, 260, 267, 270, 274 lexis, 18, 23 Liège, ix, xv, 15, 52, 67–8, 227–35, 232, 234 Lille, viii, 12, 59–60, 62, 65–6, 68, 96, 113–14, 152, 155, 162, 169–75, 177, 186, 201, 227, 230, 250, 260–1, 268–72, 279, 280–1, 288–9, 291–4, 296 commuting, xvii, 65 -Courtrai-Tournai, 59 educational categories, x, 55 loss of Picard items in, xiii, 171 Métropole, 13, 17, 65, 98, 230, 256 see also Villeneuve d’Ascq, Roubaix, Tourcoing population, 15–16 Lillois phonetic sub-system, xiii, 173 phonological sub-system, xiii, 172

303

Limburg, 38–9, 41 Lingala, 30 literature francophone writers, 18–19, 38, 81 see also publishing liquid, 210–11, 224, 226, 229, 242, 251, 264 consonants, viii, 111–14 deletion, xii, 109, 150–1, 227–8 Locarno, 69 Loft Story (Big Brother), 83 Lorraine, 38 Louis IX, 101 Lugano, 69 Luxembourg, 67, 214 Lyon, 15, 59, 66, 76, 99n.3, 268 Lys, the, 13 Maastricht, 67 Madrid, 41 Maghrebians, 75, 78, 166, 168, 195, 198, 200, 256–7, 264–7, 269–70, 271–2 Mallet, 21 Marne-la-Vallée, 64 Marseillaise, 78 Marseille, 76, 187, 189–93, 197, 201–2, 263, 267–8, 279–81 Marxist/ neo-Marxist, 58 media and popular culture, vii, 18, 25, 46, 73–4, 80–4, 86–7, 95, 98, 103, 123, 136, 144, 252, 263–4, 270 Melun-Sénart, 64 mergers, xv, 110, 164, 240 métropole bernoise, 69 métropoles d’équilibre, 17, 59, 99n.3 métropole lémanique, xvii, 68–9, 141, 144 métropole tessinoise, 69 Metz, 16 Middle Ages, 9 see also vernacular, Latin, and diglossia migration, vii, ix, 34, 46, 66, 74–8, 96–7, 249, 260–3 mimicry, 3 see also imitation



Index

minimal pair, 107, 110, 143, 145, 181, 198 mise en mots, xi, 121 Mitterand government (1981–86), 73, 84 Mons, ix, xiv, 54, 67–8, 222–7 see also Wallonia educational attainment, xv, 250 educational categories, x, 55 studies, xiv, 222 Mons-Borinage, xvii, 219 Montpellier, 15 Moroccans, 75, 91 Mulhouse, 69 Muslims, 90–2, 99 mute-e, viii, xi, 106, 111, 115–20, 124, 163, 183, 188, 190, 192–5, 198, 204n.11, 274, 282 see also schwa Namur, 67–8 Nancy, 16, 99n.3, 113, 150–2, 181–2, 251, 254 speakers, xii, 151 Nantes, 15, 99n.3 Napoleon, 26 nasal, 109, 111, 124, 134, 160, 163, 168, 182–3, 188, 193, 197–8, 200, 202–3, 210–11, 217, 229, 238–9, 265, 285, 296 vowel realisations, xiii, xv, 106–7, 124, 133, 144, 159, 164, 182, 189, 192, 194, 197–8, 202–3, 210, 215, 217, 239, 243 nasalisation, 117, 124, 183, 188, 193, 197, 209, 215, 217 see also denasalisation Nazis, the, 34, 88 neoliberal economics, 51, 85 Netherlands, the, 26, 38–40, 49, 60, 72, 75, 81, 91–2 Network System, 12–13 see also Central-Place System, history of urban Europe (model) Neuchâtel, ix, 32–3, 52, 69–70, 93, 141, 143, 145–6, 237–41, 244, 277, 282, 286, 291–3, 296 vowel recognition, xii, 146

neutralisation, xiii, 145–6, 164, 172, 215–16, 238, 241, 243 New York, 14, 54 see also USA Noirmoutier, 37 nominalism, 91 non-Romance languages, 22 see also Breton, Basque-, Alsatian-, Frankishspeaking regions, 24 Nord–Pas-de-Calais, viii, xvii, 22, 48, 65–6, 75, 78, 108, 163, 165, 168–75, 185, 265, 273, 280–1 Norman, 38 Normandy, viii, 22, 175–80 North Africans, 75 Northern Ireland see also Ireland Belfast (Milroy study), 61, 97 Northern Irish (people), 41 Norway, 35, 72, 81 N-VA (Nieuw Vlaams-Alliantie), 77, 86 see also political parties Nyon, 70 obstruent, 109, 111, 210–11, 224, 228, 232, 251, 264 post-obstruent, xii, 112, 150–1 occupational structure changes in, vii, 50–9 Oc region, viii, 183–5 Oise, the, 22 Oïl, 12 French, 107, 150, 293 usage in the early to mid-20th century, viii, 158–60 omission phenomena, viii, 111–20 oral vowel, xii, 132–3, 144, 194, 197 distinctions, 143 distribution, xiii, 188, 202 in open syllables, xv, 242 in open stressed syllables, xiv, 208 phonemes, xi, 106 Ordinances of Villers-Cotterêts (1539), 21 see also Latin, Villers-Cotterêts Orléans, 16, 163–4



304 Index

out-group, 4 see also in-group overlayering (Überschichtung), 11 overt prestige, 12, 14, 58, 105, 123, 127, 142, 148, 259 see also covert prestige, prestige norm palatal, 109, 134, 160, 184, 189, 191, 200, 211, 224, 238–9, 295 palatalisation, 110, 164–5, 167–8, 174–5 Paris, 48, 62–4, 66, 76, 78 centrality of, 12–20 GDP, compared to Belgium and Switzerland 16–17 Greater, 39 employment, 16–17, 64 suburbs, 58 vowel recognition, xii, 146 16th-century, 9 Parti chrétien-social, 91 see also political parties Parti démocrate-chrétien, 91 see also political parties Parti évangélique, 91 see also political parties Parti Social Chrétien, 91 see also political parties Pas-de-Calais, 10 Avion, 10, 37 patois ouvriers, 41 pays des Chtimis, xvii, 170 paralect, 40–1, 136 PFC data, xv, 109, 146, 156, 178, 181, 187, 193, 195, 197, 200, 203n.8, 218, 227–8, 238, 241–3, 277, 282, 284, 289, 295–6 pharyngeal, 211, 232, 265–7 pharyngealisation, 163–5, 167–8 phonetic(s), 255, 273 context, 109 contrasts, 111, 161–2 distance, 284 distinctions, 169, 172, 192, 198, 246, 273 features, 105, 166, 214

305

general, 116 of French, 110, 277 quality, 163 realisation, 116, 148, 159, 193 space, 108 sub-system of Lille, xiii, 173 variability, 107–8, 167–8, 183, 255, 265 phonological features divergent, xv, 265 phonology, 107, 116, 135, 138, 155, 161, 181–2, 185, 227, 264, 288, 294 Picard, 38, 78 Picardie, 22 Poitou, 22, 37, 61 Poldersnederlands, 40 Poles, 75 politics developments, 29–30 elections, 29, 77, 98n.1 electoral rights, 26–7 see also universal suffrage political action, 86 political discourse, 102–3 political parties, 19, 34–5, 74, 77, 84, 86, 91 voting area BHV (Bruxelles-Hal-Vilvorde), 29 voting patterns, 19, 35 Portugal, 75 Portuguese, 30 post-diaglossic era, vii, 39 post-industrial era, vii, 2, 39, 46, 59–60, 65, 259, 274 see also post-diaglossic era post-industrial economy, vii, 45–9 post-modernist, 4 publishing, 18 purchasing power parity (PPP), 17, 49 population density, x, 60 pre-rhotic, 162, 166–8, 171, 173–4, 209, 265 prescriptive norm (PN), xi, 105–6, 107–9, 124, 172–3, 178, 188, 198, 203, 253



Index

prestige forms, 5, 11, 41, 88 norm, 12, 36, 39, 42, 98, 179 see also overt prestige, covert prestige standard, 7 professionalisation, 51–2, 90, 97 pronouns, 93–6 see also address forms, informalisation Protestantism, 12, 26, 33–4, 91, 101–2, 139, 236–7 Provence, xii, 11, 22, 77–8, 101, 124, 152, 187, 189–94, 197–9, 201–2, 260, 262–3, 273, 279, 288 Provençal, 22, 78 regional standard, viii, xii, 11, 123–5 psychosocial, 3–4 Quebec, viii, 18, 31, 34, 43, 73–4, 79, 100, 125–6, 275, 281–3, 287, 289, 292, 295 radio, public service, xi, 114 see under media Randstad, 39–40 rattachistes, 31 Reading task, xiv–xv, 225, 233 Received Pronounciation, 6, 25, 40–1, 103 see also English redundancy, 111 Reference French, viii, xi, 102, 105, 107–8, 110, 136, 142, 168, 176, 182, 207, 211, 253 regiolectal, 36, 39, 41, 43, 173, 274, 276 region as a demographic attribute, 4 Regional Loyalty Index (RLI), 269, 272 register, 105, 122, 274 Reims, 16 religion affiliation, xi, 58, 77, 89, 90–3 practice, 33–4, 46, 87, 97 see also Protestantism, Catholicism, Jews, Christianity, Muslim, Buddhism

Rennes, 15 ‘republican elitism,’ 5 research themes, vii, 1 resocialisation, 37 see also socialisation, desocialisation Revolutionary regime (1790s), 20–1, 25 ideology of, 23 rhymes, xv, 240 Romance-speaking regions, 24, 37, 42 see also non-Romance Romandie, 35 Romansch, 37 Rotterdam, 13, 39 Roubaix, 17, 58, 60–1, 65, 99n.3 Roudy, Yvette, 73 Rouen, 15–16 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 19 see also La Nouvelle Héloïse RTBF, xii, 48, 74, 83, 98n.1, 99n.7, 136–7, 148, 247 Ruhr, the, 41 Russia, 23 Russian, 30 Saint-Germain-en-Laye, 64 Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, 64 Sarkozy government, 84, 125 Savoy, 31 Strongly Articulated Variants (SAVs), xv, 232–4, Saxony, 39 Scandinavia, 42, 78 Scarpe, the, 13 schwa, 106, 111, 116, 120, 124, 134, 154, 163, 188, 192–3, 195–8, 200–3, 207, 208–11, 218, 224–5, 228–9, 234–5, 251, 253–4, 275, 277, 281–2, 286 see also mute-e deletion, xiii, 196 frequency of use, xv, 234 prepausal, xi, 119 Schweizerische Volkspartei, 77 see also political parties Scotland, 41 Scots Gaelic, 37 (people), 41



306 Index

SHAPE, 87 Slovakia, 75 social changes in the second half of the 20th century, 40 identity, 3–4 levelling see under levelling mobility, 53, 121, 222–3, 226–30, 232–3, 252 and rates of WFCD in Conversation task, xiv, 230 networks, 50, 61, 71 profile of speakers, xiv, 228 practice(s), vii–viii, 4, 7–8, 44–99, 136, 211, 236, 263, 275–6 representations, 88–99 revolution of the 1960s, 8, 64, 71–2, 75, 82, 89, 92, 95, 97–8, 114–15, 183, 194, 205, 208, 218–19, 268–9 transformation, 8, 96 socialisation, 11, 36–7, 259 see also desocialisation, resocialisation Socialist Party (in Wallonia), 77, 86 see also political parties sociolectal, 163, 274 sociolinguistic situations of western Europe, vii, 8 sociolinguistics axioms, 3 quantitative, 5 socio-professional categories, x, 54 Spain, 25–6, 35, 37, 41, 60, 72, 75, 81, 90–1 Spanish, 20, 30, 37, 42–3, 75, 95, 103 sport, 41, 77–8, 83, 89 standardisation, vii, 5, 7, 103 see also dedialectalisation Haugen’s model, 9 in Belgium, 8–43 in France, 8–43 in Switzerland, 8–43 Strasbourg, 15, 37, 99n.3 statistical norm, 105–7, 110, 123

307

stigma, 36, 96, 105, 114, 124, 127–8, 130, 134, 136, 138, 189, 200, 217, 229–31, 236, 246–7 stylistic variation, viii, xvi, 6, 40, 111–20, 267, 274 and affrication, xvi, 266 relation with regional and social variation, ix, 153–8 style, 105, 109, 111, 113–20, 122, 134–5, 148, 153–4, 165, 179–81, 196, 200, 218, 223, 225–7, 234–5, 250–2, 258, 264, 266–9, 271–2, 280 shift, xi, xvi, 112–3, 220, 269 subject clitic pronouns, xi, 112 Sub-Saharan Africa, 75 Suisse romande, 12, 74 education, 42, 90–1 francophone, 11, 16 Francoprovençal substrate, ix, 236–7 French-speaking, 12 linguistic adaptation, 73 oral vowels, xii, 144 prestigious pronunciations, viii, 43, 138–49 unemployment, 32 supradialectal norm, 35–6, 39 forms, 40 varieties, 39–40 supralocal forms, 40 French, xii–xiii, xvii, 6–7, 36, 84, 96, 107, 112, 119–20, 136, 138–9, 146–8, 154–6, 158–9, 162–5, 168, 172, 175–8, 181–3, 185–6, 198, 200, 202, 216, 224, 235, 247, 253, 268 non-supralocal features, xii, 84, 133, 137, 147, 148, 162, 166, 215, 236–7, 239, 243 spread of, viii, xvii, 7, 186 Sweden, 10, 23, 35, 49, 60, 72, 75, 81, 91 Swedish, 95, 281 Swiss, Italian-speaking, 11, 77 Romanche-speaking, 11



Index

Switzerland accents, viii, 100, 138–49 dialects, 11 features, xv, 239 francophone cities, xi, 14, 70 GDP, x, 16–17 gender equality, xi, 72 German-speaking, 9 Gini index, x, 53 language change, 8–43, 31 linguistic and territorial divisions, xvii, 33 linguistic levelling, viii–ix, 150–248 as peripheral within Frenchspeaking space, 20 population (working), x, 47 pronunciation, xii, 145 prosperity (relative), x, 49 secondary-school pupils, xv, 240 sociolinguistic situation, 1 standardisation, 8–43 urban areas (major), xvii, 68 syllables checked, xv, 242 open, xv, 242 open stressed, xiv, 208 pre-iambic, 181–3 spondaic, 181–3 stress, xii, xiv, 108, 116, 132–4, 143–4, 167–8, 176, 181–3, 207–10, 233, 237, 248n.4 trochaic, 181–3 symbolic representations, vii, 44–5 syntax, 18 television programming in France, Belgium and Switzerland, 18 viewing, xi, 81 see under media, RTBF, TSR terrorism, 77, 88 Tessin, 32, 35, 77 theology, 10 Third Republic, the, 21 Toulouse, 15, 66, 99n.3 Touraine, 101, 163–5, 201 Tourcoing, 17, 60, 65, 99n.3 Tournai, ix, xiv, xv, 13, 67–8, 227–35, 229–30, 232, 234

Tordeur, Jean, 74 Tunisia, 78 Tunisians, 75 Turkish, 30, 78, 91 Turks, 75 Treaty of Rome, 73 TSR (Télévision Suisse Romande), xii, 35, 83, 139, 141, 147, 247 Umgangsprache (generalised vernacular), 40 United Kingdom, iii–iv, 1, 5–6, 9, 11, 25, 35, 37, 41, 49, 53, 60, 72, 75, 81, 83, 90, 95–7, 131, 153, 155, 196, 203n.9, 217, 254, 275, 284, 286, 291 see also English, Welsh, Scots, Northern Irish United Nations, 87–8 Union Démocratique du Centre (UDC), 34–5, 77, 86 universal suffrage, 26–7 urbanisation, vii, 41, 44–6, 59–70, 153, 251 urbanites, x, 60 urban riots (2005), 77 USA, x, 49, 53, 90–1, 96 Utrecht, 39 uvular, xiv, 109, 134, 165, 167, 184, 190–1, 200, 211, 220–1, 232, 238, 265 Valais, the ix, 32, 37, 237–40 Valaisain informants, xv, 239 VALIBEL project, 135 variable liaison, viii, xi, 111, 114–15, 120, 123, 294 variationist method, ix, 1, 10, 40, 45, 53–4, 96, 111–12, 117, 120, 184, 194, 217, 222, 257–8, 264, 275 see also Labovian method sociolinguistics, 3, studies, ix, 217–18 Vaud, the, ix, 12–14, 32, 34, 54, 70, 76, 240–6 speakers, xv, 18, 242–3 towns and districts, xv, 244



308 Index

velar, 124, 134, 163, 165, 167, 173–4, 193–4, 197, 202, 209–11, 216, 238–9, 265 stops, xvi, 266 Venice, 12, 14 verbs, 108, 114, 179, 281, 291–2 Verlan, 78 vernacular, 88 ancestral, 11, 24 Brussels, 14 Latin, 9 local, 23 national varieties, 11 non-Romance, 11 Parisian, viii, xiii, 14, 36, 105, 108, 163–9, 185, 265 prominence, xiii, 173 regional, 10, 42 desocialisation of traditional, 19 stigmatised, 96 urban, 5, 39, 41 urban youth vernaculars, ix, 263–73 variants, 58 Versailles, 64 Verviers, 68 Vevey-Montreux, 68, 70 Vietnam, 92 Villeneuve d’Ascq, 17 see also Lille Villers-Cotterêts, 22 Vlaams Belang, 77, 86 see also political parties vocalic features in regional varieties, xii, 163 voiced, 109, 192, 210–11, 224–6, 232, 248n.2 voiceless, 109, 184, 210–11, 224, 227, 229, 232–3, 248n.2 vowel back, 107 distribution, xii, 160 see also oral vowel distribution front, 107, 168, 209, 239 high, 108, 134, 147, 173, 216, 239, 243 lax, 116, 173, 207, 209–11, 214–16 length, xiii, 106–7, 134, 160, 181, 183, 216, 232, 239 low, 108, 238

309

mid, 108, 111, 116, 120, 124, 134, 159, 164, 173, 175–6, 180, 182, 189, 192, 198–9, 202, 210, 216, 238–9, 288 realisations, xiv, 208 see also nasal vowel realisations rounded, 116, 134, 144, 163, 172, 192, 194, 202, 208–11, 242 style shift, xvi, 271 tense, 116, 122, 210 unrounded, 106, 116, 132–3, 144, 208, 242 Wales, 41, 196 Wallonia, 14, 27–30, 38, 41, 48, 60, 75, 75–7 accent features, xiv, 215 dialect regions (traditional), xvii, 11–12, 212 Parliament, 28 population, xi, 68 regional varieties, ix, 211–14 speakers, 19, 27, 31 urban areas, xvii, 67 Washington, 14 see also USA Waterloo, 26 Welsh, see also Wales language, 37 people, 41 Western Europe sociolinguistic situations, 8 WFCD (word-final consonant devoicing), 136–7, 145–6, 171–2, 174, 192, 214, 216–18, 223–5, 229, 230–1, 230, 233, 241, 247, 256–7, 261, 273 in Conversation task in Gembloux, xiv, 229–30 in Tournai, xiv, 229–30 William of Orange, 26 word-final, xii, 109, 111–13, 124, 136, 143–5, 150–1, 160, 162–5, 167–8, 171–3, 176, 188–9, 191–6, 198–200, 204, 209–11, 214–15, 224, 228, 232, 253, 256, 265, 270–1, 292



Index

310 Index xenophobia, 53, 77 Yugoslavia, 75 zeitgeist, viii, 4, 6, 8, 45–6, 84–96, 100 Zürich, 32, 69, 80, 88, 93



word-initial, 115, 181, 232 word-medial, 188–9, 192, 210–11 World War I, 19, 26–7, 41, 71, 80, 165–6, 193 World War II, 20, 34, 39, 48, 75, 87, 96, 106, 156, 179, 273 pre-World War II, 237, 264 post-World War II, 53, 59, 61, 252

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