THE LEARNING OF SOCIOLINGUISTIC VARIATION BY ADVANCED FSL LEARNERS

Abstract

This paper synthesizes research on the acquisition of linguistic variation by learners of French as a second language-an overview that, to our knowledge, is the first of its kind. It also presents a case study on French immersion students' acquisition of the pronouns nous and on "we," an alternation in many varieties of spoken French. The study shows that the students use the mildly marked variant on slightly more often than the formal variant nous but much less often than native speakers (who use it almost categorically) and immersion teachers (who strongly favor it). Female and middle-class students favor nous, students with greater extracurricular French language exposure favor on, and students who speak a Romance language at home favor nous. Various explanations are proposed for these correlations. Finally, the students, like L1 Francophones, favor on in linguistic contexts in which the referent is both nonspecific and unrestricted.We would like to thank the following people for their comments on a previous version of this paper:Our study presents a variationist analysis of the alternation between the subject pronouns nous and on, both of which designate two or more individuals including the speaker. This case of variation has been documented in many varieties of contemporary spoken French. The objective of our study is twofold. First, we seek to determine whether French immersion students use both pronouns nous and on to mean "we" (e.g., Ma soeur et moi nous allons à la même école and Ma soeur et moi on va à la même école, both of which mean "My sister and I, we go to the same school"). Second, we seek to determine whether the immersion students' usage of these pronouns is conditioned by the same linguistic and extralinguistic constraints that have an impact on native speaker usage as well as by independent variables that are specific to second language (L2) learners-for example, the amount of exposure to native French outside school and the learners' first language (L1). As such, this study belongs to a strand of SLA research that investigates the learning of sociolinguistic variation by L2 learners. Within this strand of research, numerous studies have focused on French as a second language (FSL), but no synthesis of these studies' findings has yet been attempted. Thus, our paper will include such a synthesizing overview. RESEARCH ON VARIATION IN SLAL1 sociolinguistic research has demonstrated that native speakers' alternation between two or more linguistic elements (variants) expressing the same meaning (referred to hereafter as L1 variation) is an integral part of spoken language competence (Labov, 1966(Labov, , 1972. It affects all components of language (syntax, morphology, lexicon, etc.). It is highly frequent in L1 discourse and constrained by both linguistic factors (e.g., factors pertaining to the linguistic context in which the variants are used) and extralinguistic factors (e.g., gender, social status or group identity, and register or style).However, the bulk of research on SLA has focused on as...

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