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

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.

New speakers: Challenges and opportunities for variationist sociolinguistics

“…In these studies, then, early conceptualisations of new speakers are sketched out: in the context of Basque, for instance, they are described by Urla () as middle‐class urban dwellers, characteristics not typically associated with native speakers of minority varieties such as Basque or Occitan, traditionally viewed as overwhelmingly rural and working class (see e.g . Blanchet & Armstrong, ). Moreover, the new Catalonians make use of different constructions of self that do not necessarily align clearly with community norms.…”

Les variétés régionales non-méridionales de France: nivellement; dédialectalisation; supralocalisation

“…Si le sens du terme «dédialectalisation» semble clair (c'est-à-dire, que les locuteurs, dont le parler normal maintient des traits caractéristiques de leurs origines géographiques, ont néanmoins tendance à éviter des formes perçues comme dialectales) son emploi est quelque peu problématique, car le statut de ces variétés traditionnellement stigmatisées a été réhaussé au cours des dernières décennies. Il est devenu usuel de considérer commes des «langues» ces variétés appelées historiquement «patois» ou «dialectes» (Blanchet & Armstrong 2006). En France, l'inventaire de ces langues s'est accru considérablement depuis la Loi Deixonne de 1951, passant de quatre en 1951 à 75 en 1999 et inclut neuf langues d'Oïl et le francoprovençal (Rapport Cerquiglini de 1999).…”

“…En France, on peut noter une seule exception partielle, celle des accents méridionaux, et surtout celui de Provence, largement perçu comme plus agréable que l'accent parisien, et non seulement par des personnes originaires du sud (e.g. Taylor 1996, Blanchet & Armstrong 2006. Quant aux accents des autres régions, les commentaires valorisants sont peu nombreux.…”

Introduction

“…There has been no international or even trans-regional sense of FP identity (Grinevald and Bert 2013), though trans-regional cooperative efforts are beginning to emerge (see Diémoz, this issue). Instead, native speakers refer to their own varieties as "patois" (Kasstan 2016; Meune, this issue), the same term used to refer to other non-standard varieties (see Blanchet and Armstrong 2006). Their attitudes are focused at the highly localised level only (Nagy 2000;Kasstan 2015), where, in the context of France at least, it has been argued that FP is only deployed as "post-vernacular" practice (cf.…”