Introduction: the Linguistic Study of Acadian French

Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique 53(1), 2008

Introduction: The Linguistic Study of Acadian French

We are pleased to present this special issue devoted to Acadian French, a variety of North American French spoken mainly in Atlantic Canada. Acadian French differs linguistically from its better-known neighbour, Quebec French, due in part to the different European origins of the colonists: the majority of Acadian settlers came from the Centre-Ouest region of France, whereas Quebec colonists were more diversified, with substantial numbers of settlers from north of the Loire Val ley. Even more important than the geographical origins of Acadian French is the relative degree of isolation of its speakers over the course of more than three centuries. Acadian French has preserved features lost in other French varieties spoken in North America and in Europe, and so provides a window on the past. For instance, until fairly recently most Acadian varieties preserved the traditional morphology of the verb: for example, the first person plural ye ... -ons (je parlous 'we speak'), and the third person plural Us ... -ont (ilsparlont 'they speak'). This usage began to decline in France centuries ago (Beaulieu and Cichocki, this issue; Flikeid and Peronnet 1989; King 2005). Similarly, the simple-past tense, the passe" simple — as in Us coupirent 'they cut' —survived in most Acadian varieties well into the 20th century. This usage has almost totally disappeared from oral French spoken elsewhere in the francophone world (Haden 1948; Flikeid 1997). In other ways, Acadian French is innovative, having had limited contact with normative French over the centuries. This provides the setting for changes nascent in colloquial French to become advanced in Acadian varieties, such as use of a default singular form of the verb in subject relatives (e.g., les pecheurs qui va a la cote 'fishers who goes [sic] to the shore') instead of matching the number of the subject (King 2005). Some of this innovation involves the linguistic effects of contact with English, including high levels of lexical borrowing (Flikeid 1989a; King 2000) and the development of what some have argued to be a mixed code, chiac, spoken in the Moncton area of southeastern New Brunswick (Perrot 2001). Today Acadian communities are scattered throughout the four Atlantic prov inces. They are found on western Newfoundland's Port-au-Port Peninsula, in the northwest, northeast, and southeast of New Brunswick, in the Evangeline and Tignish regions of western Prince Edward Island, and in pockets of Nova Sco tia ranging from Cheticamp, lie Madame, and Pomquet in the northeast of the

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 170.106.202.58, on 02 Oct 2021 at 12:40:09, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008413100000864 2 CJL/RCL 53(1), 2008

province to Baie Sainte-Marie and Pubnico in the southwest. As well, there are speakers of Acadian French in areas peripheral to the Atlantic Provinces: the Gaspe Peninsula, the Magdalen Islands (Iles-de-la-Madeleine), and in the north east United States. A related variety, Cajun French, is spoken in Louisiana. The social circumstances of Acadian speakers in the Atlantic Provinces — degree of contact with external varieties of French, degree of contact with vari eties of English, access to schooling in French, use of French in the workplace — vary considerably across regions. For instance, contact with external varieties of French came relatively late to Newfoundland Acadian communities, dating from the 1970s, whereas there is a long history of such contact in the Cheticamp area of Nova Scotia and in the Moncton area of New Brunswick. In northeastern New Brunswick, there is relatively little contact with English, for example the Ship- pagan area is almost 100% francophone; at the other extreme, Pubnico in Nova Scotia and Tignish in Prince Edward Island have French as a minority language in the community, as well as in the province at large. Thus, Acadian French puts the researcher in the privileged position of being able to test the effects of dif fering degrees of contact. With regard to the linguistic phenomena mentioned above, the traditional morphology is well preserved in the Newfoundland variety but to a lesser extent in northeastern New Brunswick; the passe simple has disap peared fairly recently from southeastern New Brunswick but remains vibrant in Baie Sainte-Marie, Nova Scotia (Flikeid 1997). Similarly, the effects of English vary considerably from region to region: as previously mentioned, the Moncton area has been the subject of quite a number of studies of English influence on French, whereas such influence is more or less non-existent in the northeast of New Brunswick. Surprisingly, little research on Acadian French appeared in print prior to the 1980s. Very early dialect descriptions (Geddes 1908) and dissertations involving functionalist analyses of the phonology (Lucci 1972; Ryan 1981) and morphology (Gesner 1979; Peronnet 1989; Ryan 1982) along with Massignon's mid-century lexical survey (published as Massignon 1962) formed the bulk of the publications. Indeed, Gesner (1986), in his Bibliographie annotee de linguistique acadienne, was able to provide comprehensive descriptions of all of the existing literature, on all levels of language and including unpublished student papers, in only 89 pages. The situation has changed considerably since the mid-1980s. Today there are large variationist sociolinguistic corpora for varieties spoken in all four At lantic provinces: those constructed by Beaulieu (1993) and Flikeid (1984) for New Brunswick, Flikeid (1989b) for Nova Scotia, and King (1985, 1991) for Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island. Ongoing research programs continue to exploit these corpora. Other databases of recorded speech have also been established. The Cen tre de recherche en linguistique appliquee (CRLA) at the Universite de Moncton

houses a number of corpora.' Acadian data are part of the Base de donnees lexicographiques panfrancophone project (BDLP) at Universite Laval.2 See also Falkert (2005), Peronnet and Kasparian (1998), and Wiesmath (2006). Appropriately, Acadian French is currently the object of study in many ar eas: computational linguistics (Chevalier et al. 2004; Cichocki 2006), dialectology (Brasseur 2000; P6ronnet et al. 1998), discourse analysis (Butler 1990; Boudreau and White 2004), grammatical theory (Beaulieu and Balcom 2002; King 2005), acquisition of the referential variety (Balcom, this issue), lexicography (Cormier 1999), the sociology of language (Allard and Landry 1998; Boudreau and Dubois 2004), and variationist linguistics (Beaulieu 1993; Flikeid 1989b; King 2000). The articles in the present volume address several of the research themes outlined above. Balcom explores the learning of Referential French by univer sity students who are speakers of Acadian French, specifically auxiliary use with two subclasses of unaccusative verbs by first- and fourth-year university students from northeastern and southeastern New Brunswick. She finds that the fourth-year students were closer to the referential norm in their auxiliary use than first-year students. Beaulieu and Cichocki examine internal factors that constrain variation in the traditional third person plural Us ... -ont form in a community in northeast ern New Brunswick; they show that social networks within the community also play a significant role in the maintenance of this form. Butler and King document the functions of the discourse marker mais dame, popular in 19th-century France but moribund in the present day; it is, however, in robust use in the Newfound land variety, where it has a number of functions in conversational and narrative discourse.

Patricia Balcom, Universite de Moncton Louise Beaulieu, Universite de Moncton Gary R. Butler, York University Wladyslaw Cichocki, University of New Brunswick Ruth King, York University

REFERENCES

Allard, R6al, and Rodrigue Landry. 1998. French in New Brunswick. In Language in Canada, ed. John Edwards, 202-225. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beaulieu, Louise. 1993. Une analyse sociolinguistique du pronom Wh inanime' dans les relatives libres dans le francais acadien du Nouveau-Brunswick. Linguistica Atlantica 15:39-68.

www2.umoncton.ca/cfdocs/crla/documents/depliantCorpus . pdf. www.tlfq.ulaval.ca/bdlp/acadie.

Beaulieu, Louise, and Patricia Balcom. 2002. La structure des propositions adverbiales du franfais: arguments sociolinguistiques. Journal of French Language Studies 12:241- 262. Boudreau, Annette, and Lise Dubois. 2004. Les espaces sociolinguistiques de l'Acadie des Maritimes. In Discours et identites: la francite canadienne entre modernite el mondialisation, ed. Monica Heller and Normand Labrie, 77-100. Brussels: Editions modulaires europ£ennes. Boudreau, Annette, and Chantal White. 2004. Turning the tide in Acadian Nova Scotia: How heritage tourism is changing language practices and representations of language. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 49:327-351. Brasseur, Patrice. 2000. Dictionnaire des regionalismes dufrancais de Terre-Neuve. Tubin gen: Niemeyer. Butler, Gary R. 1990. Saving isn't believing: Conversation, narrative and the discourse of belief in a French Newfoundland community. St. John's: ISER Books and the Ameri can Folklore Society. Chevalier, Gisele, Sylvia Kasparian, and Max Silberztein. 2004. E16ments de solution pour le traitement automatique d'un frangais oral regional. Traitement automatique des langues 45:41-62. Cichocki, Wladyslaw. 2006. Geographic variation in Acadian French Ixl: What can corre spondence analysis contribute toward explanation? Literary and Linguistic Computing 21:529-541. Cormier, Yves. 1999. Le dictionnaire dufrancais acadien. Montreal: Editions Fides. Falkert, Anika. 2005. Quelques sp6cificites du francos acadien des Iles-de-la-Madeleine. In Francais d'Amerique: approches morphosyntaxiques, ed. Patrice Brasseur and Anika Falkert, 71-82. Paris: L'Harmattan. Flikeid, Karin. 1984. La variation phonetique dans le parler acadien du nord-est du Nouveau- Brunswick: etude sociolinguistique. New York: Peter Lang. Flikeid, Karin. 1989a. 'Moiti6 anglais, moiti6 francos'? : emprunts et alternance de langues dans les communautes acadiennes de la Nouvelle-Ecosse. Revue quebecoise de linguistique theorique et appliquee 8:111-221. Flikeid, Karin. 1989b. Recherches sociolinguistiques sur les parlers acadiens du Nouveau- Brunswick et de la Nouvelle-Ecosse. In Le francais canadien parle hors Quebec, ed. Raymond Mougeon and Edouard Beniak, 183-199. Quebec: Presses de l'Universite Laval. Flikeid, Karin. 1997. Structural aspects and current sociolinguistic situation of Acadian French. In French and Creole in Louisiana, ed. Albert Valdman, 255-286. New York: Plenum. Flikeid, Karin, and Louise Peronnet. 1989. N'est-ce pas vrai qu'il taut dire: j'avons et6?: divergences regionales en acadien. Le Francais moderne 57:219-228. Geddes, James. 1908. Study of the Acadian-French dialect spoken on the north shore of the Baie-des-Chaleurs. Halle: Niemeyer. Gesner, B. Edward. 1979. Etude morphosyntaxique du parler acadien de la Bale Sainle- Marie, Nouvelle-Ecosse (Canada). Quebec: Centre international de recherche sur le bilinguisme. Gesner, B. Edward. 1986. Bibliographic annotee de linguistique acadienne. Quebec: Cen tre international de recherche sur le bilinguisme.

Haden, Ernest F. 1948. La petite Cendrillouse, version acadienne de Cendriilon: etude linguistique. Archives de folklore 3:21-34. King, Ruth. 1985. Linguistic variation and language contact: A study of the French spoken in four Newfoundland communities. Papers from the Fifth International Conference on Methods in Dialectology, ed. Henry J. Warkentyne, 211-232. Victoria: University of Victoria. King, Ruth. 1991. WH-words, WH-questions, and relative clauses in Prince Edward Island French. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 36:65-85. King, Ruth. 2000. The lexical basis of grammatical borrowing: A Prince Edward Island French case study. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. King, Ruth. 2005. Morphosyntactic variation and theory: Subject-verb agreement in Aca dian French. In Syntax and variation: Reconciling the biological and the social, ed. Leonie Cornips and Karin Corrigan, 199-232. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Lucci, Vincent. 1972. Phonologie de I 'acadien. Montreal: Didier. Massignon, Genevieve. 1962. Les purlers francais d'Acadie: enquete linguistique. 2 vols. Paris: Klincksieck. Peronnet, Louise. 1989. Le purler acadien du sud-est du Nouveau-Brunswick: elements grammaticaux et lexicaux. New York: Peter Lang. Peronnet, Louise, Rosemary Babitch, Wladyslaw Cichocki, and Patrice Brasseur. 1998. Atlas linguistique du vocabulaire maritime acadien. Qu6bec: Presses de l'Universite' Laval. Peronnet, Louise, and Sylvia Kasparian. 1998. Vers une description du francais standard acadien: analyse des traits morphosyntaxiques. In Francais d'Amerique: variation, creolisation, normalisation, ed. Patrice Brasseur, 249-260. Avignon: Centre d'6tudes canadiennes (CECAV), University d'Avignon. Perrot, Marie-Eve. 2001. Bilinguisme en situation minoritaire et contact de langues : l'exem- ple du chiac. Fails de langue 18:127-137. Ryan, Robert. 1981. Une analyse phonologique d'un parler acadien de la Nouvelle-Ecosse (Canada), region de la Bale Ste-Marie. Qu6bec: Centre international de recherche sur le bilinguisme. Ryan, Robert. 1982. Analyse morphologique du groupe verbal du parler franco-acadien de la region de la Baie Sainte-Marie, Nouvelle-Ecosse (Canada). Quebec: Centre international de recherche sur le bilinguisme. Wiesmath, Raphaele. 2006. Le francais acudien: unulyse syntaxique d'un corpus oral re- cueilli uu Nouveuu-Brunswick, Cunuda. Paris: L'Harmattan.