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The sociolinguistic situation of ‘contemporary dialects of French’ in France today: an overview of recent contributions on the dialectalisation of Standard French

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2006

PHILIPPE BLANCHET
Affiliation:
Université Rennes 2, Haute Bretagne, Campus Villejean, UFR ALC, 35043 Rennes cedex, France email: [email protected]
NIGEL ARMSTRONG
Affiliation:
University of Leeds

Abstract

This article presents a synthesis of the sociolinguistic situation of what the authors refer to as the ‘contemporary dialects’ of French in the France of today. The introduction emphasises the methodological and conceptual problems attending any such definition and evaluation, attempting to clarify the complex situation and to identify the various kinds of ‘dialects’, ‘uses’ and ‘speakers’. We then concentrate on the regional ‘dialects’ of French in continental France, urban and rural, and summarise a series of important recent studies, concentrating on local variation. We also distinguish the sociolinguistic situations of the northern and the southern parts of the country. Even though France is known to be a highly centralised country, whose linguistic policy has been aiming at monolingualism for the past two centuries, the article offers some possibly surprising and nuanced results that show more variation than established opinion would generally admit about contemporary France.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
2006 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

We should like to express our gratitude to Julia Bloch (an American student of sociolinguistics at Rennes 2), Henriette Walter (EPHE, Paris), Thierry Bulot (Rennes 2) and Michel Francard (Louvain-la-Neuve) for their careful reading of a first version of this article and for their useful comments.