CENTRE FOR NEWFOUNDLAND STUDIES TOTAL OF 10 PAGES ONLY MAY BE XEROXED (Without Author's Permission) ; "\. A Linguistic Description of the French Spoken on the Port-au-Port Peninsula of Western Newfoundland by © Mary Geraldine Barter Submitted in partial fulfillment of the Degree of Master of Arts Memorial University of Newfoundland April 1986 :t.• Perm i ssion has been granted L'autorisation a ete accordee to the National Library of a la Bibliotheque nationale Canad a to microfilm this du Canada de microfilmer thesis and to lend or sell cette these et de preter ou copies of the film. de vendre des exemplaires du film. The author (copyright owner) L'auteur (titulai re du droit has reserved other d'auteur) se reserve les publication rights, and autres droits de publication; neithe r the thesis nor ni la these ni de longs extens ive extracts from it extraits de celle-ci ne may be printed or otherwise doivent etre imprimes ou reproduced without his/her autrement reproduits sans son writt en permission. autorisation ecrite. ISBN 0-315-31008-1 Table of Contents Page In trociuction l List of Abbreviations .......... ....... ...... 5 Acknowledgements 8 Chapter I . The French of the Port-au-Port Peninsula and Bay St. George: A Historical Perspective .......... 12 II. The French Spoken on the Port-au- Port Peninsula .................... 40 III. The Vocabulary .................... 78 IV. Phonetic Aspects .................. 140 Appendices 184 Informants 185 Recorded Text:.s A. Mme Elizabeth Barter, La Grand'Terre 207 B. Mrne Marguerite LeCour, L'Anse-a- Canards ........................... 212 c. Mrne Lucie Simon, Cap-St-Georges ... 217 Bibliography 222 List of Figures Page 1. Map of Port-au-Port Peninsula............ 2 2. Map of Locations Relevant to the French Presence in Newfoundland................. 11 3. Photograph of Red Island - 18 4. The old two-room schoolhouse at Mainland 34 5. Mme Marie-Josephe Dube . 84 6 • Mme Joanna Cornect 188 7. Mme Eugenie Moraze 190 8. Mme. Elizabeth Barter ..................... 192 9. M. Joachim Benoit 194 10. Mme Margaret Huon 196 11. Mme. Blanche Ozon . 198 12. M. Emmanual Simon . 200 13. !vlme Lucie Simon .......................... 202 14. M. Guillaume Robin ....................... 204 iii Abstract This study is a general survey of linguistic aspects of the French dialect spoken in several small communities on the Port-au-Port Peninsula in western Newfoundland. The study is based on tape-recorded folktales and interviews of free conversation with informants from these French communities made in the past fifteen years, with added inter­ pretations attained from the author~s native experience with the dialect. The study is divided into four chapters. The first chapter is a resume of the main historical events leading to the establishment of French settlers on the Newfoundland shores and a discussion of the history of this small population to the present. Chapter II gives a general description of the grammar and syntax of the language. Noun, pronoun, adjective and verb forms are described and each point discussed, with few exceptions, is illustrated by direct quotations from the recorded corpus. Chapter III is a study of the vocabulary of the local French language, arranged in the following categories: The Land, The Sea, The Family, Human Affairs and Social Attitudes, and Other Terms, all presented with evidence of local pronunciation and typical contexts. This chapter con- eludes with a section on anglicisms used in the speech of the inhabitants. iv The final chapter describes aspects of the phonology of the local speakers, with an account of the distinctive consonants, vowels, diphthongs, and an indication of their principal phonetic qualities. The following features in particular, are discussed: palatalization, voicing and un- voicing, and methathesis. The study concludes with a selection of transcriptions of the connected speech of speakers from three of the main French-speaking communities, presented in a form of spelling suggesting the pronunciation. v Introduction The existence of a live and vibrant francophone culture on the Port-au-Port Peninsula in western Newfoundland only came to light a little more than fifteen years ago. This population is the renmant of tne European French presence in Newfoundland during the historic period when French fishing rights obtained on the shores of Newfoundland. Despite lack of contact with other French-speaking populations and the lack of formal instruction in the French language, the French dialect of the Port-au-Port has survived to the present as a vital linguistic medium. The evolution of a language under such conditions forms the back-drop for the present description of Port-au-Port french speech. Although the population of the Port-au-Port Peninsula was predominantly French-speaking during the French Shore period and subsequent years, today the number of French speakers has diminished to between two or three thousand speakers. This population is concentrated on the extreme points of the Port-au-Port Peninsula with others found scattered in other communities on the Peninsula andin Bay St. George. The main French-speaking communities of the Peninsula include Cap-St-Georges (Cape St. George), Degras, Ruisseau Rouge (Red Brook), and La Pointe a Luc (Marches Point) at the southwestern extremity; L'Anse-a-Canards (Black Duck Brook) and Maisons d'Hiver (Winterhouses) at the northeastern tip; and La Grand'Terre (Mainland) at the northwestern extremity. Although these communities have been physically isolated from each other and have been exposed to several external influences, the French spoken by French Newfoundlanders is fairly homogeneous. The present study is based on part of the tape­ recorded corpus of Newfoundland French speech as it appears in folk narrative and free conversation, recorded in the French communities in recent years. In an effort to present a broad view of the spoken language, informants from all three of the French-speaking areas of the Peninsula have been chosen to provide the corpus upon which this study is based. The primary material analyzed includes half-hour recordings of three informants from Black Duck Brook and Cape St. George and two from Mainland. The secondary material is made up of recordings from which examples were drawn to illustrate points discussed. This includes re­ cordings of two speakers, Mme Eugenie Moraze of La Grand' Terre, who appears in a recording with her daugh~er, Elizabeth Barter, and M. Guillaume (William) Robin of Cap-St-Georges. Another valuable informant is Mme Marie-Josephe Dube, also from La Grand'Terre, who provided the Breton terms discussed in the third chapter of this study. Further data on the informants and the tape-recordings are foundin the Appendices of this work. The present description of the French speech of the communities on the Port-au-Port Peninsu.la is divided vii into four chapters. The first chapter is a summary of the historical events which led to the establishment of the French in Newfoundland. The various treaties which resulted from the bitter struggle between E~gland and France for sovereignty of the island and ways in which this struggle retarded the development of the West Coast of Newfoundland are discussed. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the current situation of the French-speaking population of the Port-au-Port Peninsula vis-a-vis government policies concerning French language minorities. The second chapter describes aspects of morphology and syntax of the dialect. Noun, pronoun, adjective and verb paradigms are described with each point discussed, illustrated with a direct citation from one of the tape- recordings of the corpus. The chapter ends with a discussion of aspects of syntax. The third chapter describes vocabulary terms used by the French of the Port-au-Port. An introductory section discusses borrowings through contact with other ethnic groups of the region over the years. The final section of this chapter is a description of the anglicisms in local French speech, since English has had the greatest impact on the local French language. These items are also illustrated with direct quotations from the corpus when they appear. The vocabulary items included in this description are presented in five categories: The Land, The Sea, The Family, Human Affairs and Social Attitudes, and Other Terms. viii The final chapter describes aspects of the phonology of Port-au-Port French speech. The significant vowel and consonant phonemes are described. Among the phonological points discussed are word boundaries, nasalization and denasalization, presence o~ the aspirate h phoneme, palat­ alization, voicing, unvoicing and metathesis. As with the other chapters describing aspects of the language, each of the phonological aspects described is illustrated with direct quotations from the tape-recordings of the corpus or, when necessary, one drawn from the author•s knowledge of the language. The study concludes with recorded texts of free conversation from each of the three French-speaking areas on the Peninsula in order to give a composite view of the local speech and to illustrate the grammar and syntactical features described in the preceding chapters. ix Abbreviations The following is a list of abbreviations which have been employed in the present study. adj. adjective adv. adverb adv. phr. adverb phrase ang. anglicism arch. archaic BOB Black Duck Brook c reference in MUNFLA tape collection cf. compare with the following term conj. conjunction cpd. compound CSG Cape St. George DC Dictionary of Canadianisms def. art. definite article demons. adj. demonstrative adjective demons. pr. demonstrative pronoun disj. pr. disjunctive pronoun ONE Dictionary of Newfoundland English Eng. English exclam. exclamation Fr. French X G Glossaire H Harrap i.e. that is to say imp. imperative indef. art. indefinite article inf. informant int. interviewer interj. interjection interrog. pr. interrogative pronoun IPA International Phonetic Association LGT La Grand'Terre M Massignon rns. manuscript MUNFLA Memorial University of Newfoundland Folklore and Language Archive n.