In this Special Issue, the focus is on contact-induced language variation and change in situations of societal bilingualism that involve long-term contact between French and another language. As is well known, when two or more languages are spoken by groups of speakers in the same geographical area, over time, features from one language can be transferred to the other language, especially when the languages in question are unequal in terms of prestige, institutional support and demographic factors. The process that leads to the adoption of such features in the contact languages is generally known as INTERFERENCE or TRANSFER, and these terms are also used to describe the features in question (i.e. the end product of the process of transfer). In this issue we prefer to use the term TRANSFER over the use of the notion INTERFERENCE, as the former has fewer negative connotations than the latter.

In this paper we present a methodological approach that can be used to determine the likelihood that innovations observed in a minority language are the result of language contact. We then use this methodological approach to frame a discussion of data concerning eight innovations that can be attributed to transfer from the majority language (English) to the French of Francophones residing in the province of Ontario in Canada. This discussion shows, notably, how systemic and extra-systemic factors play a role in the emergence of these innovations. We also demonstrate that there are interesting differences in the extent to which these innovations are used across speaker groups and communities, and we argue that such differences suggest that there are thresholds of language contact associated with the emergence, or lack thereof, of particular transfer-induced innovations.

The phonological system of the French of Frenchville, Pennsylvania (USA) demonstrates a dramatic case of transfer in the latest (and last) generation of bilingual French–English speakers: the mid front round vowels, [œ] and [ø], have often been replaced by the English rhoticized schwa as found in the word sir. However, French schwa, which is arguably phonetically non-distinct from the mid front round vowels, does not participate fully in this merger. This result is unexpected given both the phonetic identity of schwa and [ø], and the fact that our speakers are not literate in French and, as such, have no access to the differential orthographic representations manifest between schwa and the mid front round vowels. The data argue strongly that schwa is, in some sense, “real” for these speakers. Based on a phonetic analysis of the vowels under consideration, we argue that transfer between two sound systems cannot be perceived as a simple case of phonetic replacement. Instead, transfer or convergence with English must be viewed as a systemic process that preserves contrast in unexpected ways. In the case at hand, the data suggest that the traditional separation between the phonetic and phonological levels of grammar cannot be maintained as each level contributes to both provoking merger and maintaining contrast in bilingual speech.

We examine the variable use of locative prepositions in Cajun French, adding two dimensions to existing studies: real-time evidence, adding a diachronic descriptive perspective, and a methodological tool, measuring the degree of exposure to French (MDI). The goal of this paper is to determine the origins and the directions of language change within the system of locative prepositions. The majority of the interviews are taken from the Cajun French/English corpus, conducted by Dubois in 1997. Our results indicate that the restricted speakers use an array of innovative forms in all locative categories. Systemic and extralinguistic evidence show that some of these forms represent interference-induced innovations, while others are internally-motivated innovations stimulated in an indirect way by language contact. A model of change emerges where the older restricted speakers introduce changes that are gradually adopted by the following generations, regardless of the extent to which their linguistic ability in Cajun French is diminished.

In language contact studies, specific features of the contact languages are often seen to be the result of transfer (interference), but it remains difficult to disentangle the role of intra-systemic and inter-systemic factors. We propose to unravel these factors in the analysis of a feature of Brussels French which many researchers attribute to transfer from (Brussels) Dutch: the adverbial use of une fois. We compare the use of this particle in Brussels French with its occurrence in corpora of other varieties of French, including several that have not been influenced by a Germanic substrate or adstrate. A detailed analysis of the frequency of occurrence, the functions and the distribution of the particle over different syntactic positions shows that some uses of une fois can be traced back to sixteenth-century French, but that there is also ample evidence for overt and covert transfer (Mougeon and Beniak, 1991) from Brussels Dutch.

The aim of this paper is to investigate a case of transfer within the context of language death. By examining data from Jersey Norman French (known to its speakers as Jèrriais) it illustrates the difficulty in determining linguistic norms for this relatively undocumented variety and suggests possible strategies to overcome this problem. The study compares systematically the occurrence of overt and covert transfer in the speech of a sample of fifty native speakers of Jèrriais via the analysis of a number of linguistic variables. The extent to which transfer-induced changes are themselves becoming established as norms within this speech community will also be considered.