Paper for the Symposium Language Contact and the Dynamics of Language: Theory and Implications 10-13 May 2007 Leipzig « Variation and contact in French spoken outside France » Françoise Gadet, Université de Paris-10 Everywhere around the world, except in France 1, the French language is « in contact » with one or several language(s). And everywhere, it is in an institutional or de facto dominated position (even, in some American situations – e. g. Newfoundland, New England or Missouri - it is so dramatically dominated as to be in a process of attrition or even approaching death). In this communication, I shall consider the relationships between variation and interference. What are the effects of contact on the scope of variation in the French language, taken in a very wide meaning ? 1. Theoretical considerations For the description of facts relating to contact in French, I shall adopt a quite unusual position for a sociolinguist, i. e . the point of view of writing a grammar. More specifically, I shall speak of my experience as a participant in a project to create a Reference Grammar of French, where I am in charge of the documentation concerning all facts of all types of possible variation in French. 1.1. The Reference Grammar of French, and the place intended to variation My participation in this huge project (including 50 collaborators, 2500 pages intended, to be published in 2009) requires me to take into account, as can be expected, diatopic, diastratic, and diaphasic variation in France itself, as well as the discursive genres and the consequences of the written/spoken dimension (if any, as far as the syntactic level is concerned). Among dimensions of variation, what appears to have the most decisive consequences on linguistic forms is diatopic variation, and especially diatopy outside France, in relation with the complex history of French around the world. French can offer the products of extremely 1 It could be said that French is also « in contact » in France, as 1) there are no isolated language, nowhere around the world, and 2) in France, a lot of speakers speaks a language other than French. But the situations of French in and outside France are certainly quite different, and it does not imply the same things, for a language, to be in a dominant or in a dominated position. 1 diversified historical situations : two main periods of expansion, through emigration and through colonization (17 e and 19 e century) ; first-degree diaspora from France, and second-degree diaspora from Quebec ; different local events and histories ; different conditions of conservation, with different isolation conditions (mainland, islands, or isolates) ; and finally, different modalities of contact with different local languages. Creoles, the extreme pole of a continuum in French varieties, won’t be considered here. What I shall argue here is that, even if the ultimate aim for a grammar is to present grammatical data, it is not possible to evaluate them without weighing and balancing sociolinguistic and syntactic arguments, concerning every phenomenon, every case, and every situation. We shall discuss here only some of the grammatical areas in which variation is to be found. And we shall establish, in every case, the reasons why they are of interest for a reflection on contact. In these variant areas, we shall try to depart from what can be said to arise from inside French itself (endogenous, internal or structural variation – Chaudenson et al 1993 would say intrasystemic), and what could, eventually, be said to be consequences of contact (exogenous variation, or intersystemic). In other words, I have to discuss the best decision as to which phenomena have to be included in the grammar, and which don’t concern a grammar, but only a sociolinguistic description. 1.2. Variation and contact My argument in this communication will concern the possible amount of variability in a language, and the effects of contact on it. Looked at as « panlectal », variation in the French language spoken outside France shows at the same time convergent and divergent features, the second kind being those we are going to consider now. My discussion will be from a syntactic point of view, being mostly concerned in subtile forms of interferences, like convergence and surdetermination of phenomena. Everything in a language cannot be variable : the grammatical zones including phenomena of variation are not dispatched everywhere in the grammar. This observation led the linguists Roman Jakobson and André Martinet, in the fifties, to conceive a model differentiating between zones in a language : they opposed invariant (or mostly so) hard core zones (« noyau dur »), and weak points in a system (« points de faiblesse ou de fragilité du système »), which are the variant areas, where reconfigurations are more or less constantly ongoing. In French, we observe that from 17th century till now, processes of reconfigurability concern mostly the same points. If there is a part of optimality (or, less restrictively, auto-regulation), it cannot be taken as the leading force, as social considerations constantly impact upon linguistic variation. 2 If the term « variation » needs to be specified, so does « contact », even if it is conventionalized. We can adopt the tentative definition in Thomason’s text : « contact is a source of linguistic change if it is less likely that a given change would have occurred outside a specific contact situation », p. 9. And, concerning syntactic facts, we can add : - a distinction between interference (concerning a rule) and borrowing (concerning a form) ; - a definition of convergence, as, for example, « the loss of a native form without counterpart in the other language, to the benefit ot a form having a counterpart in the dominant language » ; - a distinction between what is dysfunctional (a loss without compensation), and what is a reorganization or restructuring, the first one appearing only in a dying language . In fact, contact happens not between languages, but between speakers, or rather, as the sociologist Erving Goffman would put it, as a consequence of the multiple ordinary adjustments between speakers, in different language situations (what he called footing ). It is the reason why we have to take into account the diversity between speakers through a community. This position is in opposition to that held by the linguist generally said to be the theoriser of language contact, Weinreich, who wrote (1953 : 41) : « In the interference of two grammatical patterns it is ordinarily the one which uses relatively free and invariant morphemes in its paradigms which serves as the model for imitation ». Clearly, Weinreich was mostly looking for structural principles, and was not much concerned with sociolinguistic considerations. We shall then have to discuss the balance between grammatical and sociolinguistic arguments. My questions will then be : 1) Does grammatical borrowing happen (see e.g. Johanson 2002, according to whom syntax is not very open to borrowing) ? 2) If yes, in which syntactic areas does it happen ? 3) Are these areas the same in intrasystemic variation, and in effects of contact ? If no, what are the differences ? 4) Can we go as far as the hypothesis of borrowing acting on the regulation of the system ? 1.3. Which geographical zones In the grammar, I take into account all varieties of French spoken in the world, including African. But for the sake of this communication, most of my examples come from studies on North American French : Quebec, Ontario, Acadie (New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia), Newfoundland, West of Canada, New England, Missouri and Louisiana. In these instances, the language in contact is always English, typologically not very far from French. As I adopt a syntactic point of view, I first consider a linguistic phenomenon, and not sociolinguistic 3 situations, which are quite different ( e. g. Quebec well-established situation vs Missouri remanent French). I won’t speak here of African French, even though it would be interesting from the point of view of the grammatical points concerned. But the discussion is difficult enough without introducing other factors of diversity, like the extra-family and home transmission 2. I am aware this position is neither obvious nor easy to hold, and I shall return to this point in my concluding remarks. 2. Examining some specific grammatical zones We are now going to consider some of the variant areas of French, selecting them on account of different linguistic properties : the verb system is the most strongly structured, clitic pronouns are a little bit less, prepositions are close to lexicon (a system, but more open), forms like back or comme are not included in systems ; and que -phrases concern the syntax of complex structures. 2.1. Some specificities of the verbal system (examples from different North American varieties) We are dealing here first with the generalization of avoir as an auxiliary (except with some verbs, like naître and mourir ). Avoir generalization could be viewed as an influence of English (Mougeon showed in Ontario that the less the speaker is exposed to French, the more (s)he will generalize avoir ). But this phenomenon is also to be found in every ordinary spoken variety around the world, in particular in Quebec and in France (examples from « français populaire » in Bauche, 1920). The rarefaction of the subjunctive, which will only be found after il faut que , or after some very frequent verbs like vouloir , could also be understood as an influence of English. Conclusion : In all these cases, there is a convergence between English and French. But as 1) they represent internal simplification, 2) there are also found elsewhere, we won’t consider them as borrowings. 2.2. Word order of the clitic pronouns There is a tendency to eliminate whatever does not follow SVO word order, and especially pre- verbal clitics, as in il parle à nous-autres , rather than il nous parle (from Louisiana French, Valdman et al 2005, but to be found in many other places) See also je vais là , rather than j’y vais (Ontario).