Kent Academic Repository Full text document (pdf) Citation for published version Hall, Damien J. (2008) A Sociolinguistic Study of the Regional French of Normandy. Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) thesis, University of Pennsylvania. DOI Link to record in KAR https://kar.kent.ac.uk/29541/ Document Version UNSPECIFIED Copyright & reuse Content in the Kent Academic Repository is made available for research purposes. Unless otherwise stated all content is protected by copyright and in the absence of an open licence (eg Creative Commons), permissions for further reuse of content should be sought from the publisher, author or other copyright holder. Versions of research The version in the Kent Academic Repository may differ from the final published version. Users are advised to check http://kar.kent.ac.uk for the status of the paper. Users should always cite the published version of record. Enquiries For any further enquiries regarding the licence status of this document, please contact: [email protected] If you believe this document infringes copyright then please contact the KAR admin team with the take-down information provided at http://kar.kent.ac.uk/contact.html A SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDY OF THE REGIONAL FRENCH OF NORMANDY Damien John Hall A DISSERTATION in Linguistics Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2008 _________________________ Gillian Sankoff, Dissertation Supervisor _________________________ Eugene Buckley, Chair of the Graduate Group in Linguistics I gratefully dedicate this dissertation to everyone who helped. ii Acknowledgements It takes a village to raise a child, they say, and it is certainly no different for any work on the scale of a dissertation or a book. A legion of unseen people is usually behind the author and behind the scenes, helping, inspiring, providing data, correcting and fulfilling all the other functions necessary to the production of such a text. In this case, it has literally taken a village, or eleven, to produce this dissertation. I would like first place among my acknowledgements to go to the inhabitants of Amfreville, Besneville, Chef- du-Pont, Crosville-sur-Douve, Darnétal, La Bonneville, Pont-l’Abbé-Picauville, Rauville-la-Place, Rouen, St-Martin-de-Varreville and Turqueville, the places whose speech I study in this dissertation. They welcomed me and allowed me to sample and study their speech, and to share a small part of their lives and become their friend; without such a welcome, studies like this one cannot be made, or they are at least much the poorer. I look forward to continued visits to my Normandy communities, not always with microphone in hand. Next, I thank the 2003 entering Linguistics PhD cohort at the University of Pennsylvania, and chiefly among them Michael Friesner, friend, scholar of French, honorary member of my dissertation committee and mensch. He has saved me from many theoretical steps too far and other kinds of error in this dissertation. Łukasz Abramowicz, Aaron Dinkin, Maya Ravindranath, Tanja Scheffler and Joel Wallenberg are and will remain good friends, and I have learnt much from them too. I thank Gillian Sankoff and Bill Labov for their insight over the years, too; it has been a privilege and a pleasure to work with you, and I look iii forward to encountering you all at conferences and on social occasions in years to come. The same goes for my many other friends at Penn: people in Linguistics in other years than my own, friends from other disciplines, and simply those who smoothed the path and made it a pleasure to be at the University. I am sorry I cannot list you all individually, but I hope you know who you are. Finally, and with love, I thank my parents, John and Yvonne Hall, and my wife, Suzanne Dorf Hall. Your support, from the financial to the emotional, including the making of food, has made this possible. Permission for use of copyrighted works I gratefully acknowledge the permission of the copyright-holders to use the following works: • Figure 1-1 (pg. 7): taken from Lepelley 1999a: 46, with permission from the Presses Universitaires de Caen • Figure 2-5 (pg. 51): taken from Aggolmération de Rouen 2007 (a website), with permission from the webmaster iv ABSTRACT A SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDY OF THE REGIONAL FRENCH OF NORMANDY Damien John Hall Gillian Sankoff This dissertation is the first investigation of the Regional French of Normandy using sociolinguistic principles of data collection and analysis as outlined by Labov (2001). It provides a partial characterisation of the regional variety of French spoken in Normandy, France, by analysis of linguistic, dialectological and attitudinal data collected in two sites: La Bonneville (rural Lower Normandy) and Darnétal (urban Upper Normandy). This is the first sociolinguistic study of any variety of European French to make exclusive use of instrumental measurements for the investigation of phonological variables (the vowels in this study). Two vowel variables and one morphosyntactic variable, all of which have been noted in the literature as characteristic of the Regional French of Normandy, are investigated in the purely linguistic part of the study. In the dialectological / attitudinal part of the study, informants were asked to fill in maps of Normandy according to where they thought people spoke differently. They were then asked whether there was a local accent in their area, whether they had it themselves, whether they could give any examples of the accent and whether they thought the accent was a good one. In the final part of the dissertation, the results of these questions are v compared with the phonological results speaker-by-speaker, to determine in particular whether there is any correlation between an individual speaker's opinion about the 'goodness' of the accent and their own phonological results (whether or not they actually use the Normandy variant of the vowel variables). The conclusions of the study are that the effect of a Norman-language substrate in the Regional French of Normandy is limited at best, and that, in linguistic terms, Normandy still constitutes a single speech-community. However, in perceptual-dialectological terms, Normandy is arguably not a single speech-community, since there is little shared knowledge of norms between the communities, at opposite ends of Normandy, which are investigated here. Reference Labov, William. 2001. Principles of Linguistic Change, Volume 2: Social Factors. Oxford, UK and Malden, MA, USA: Blackwell. vi Contents Acknowledgements ………………………………………………………………. iii Abstract ………………………………………………………………………….. v Contents ………………………………………………………………………….. vii List of Tables …………………………………………………………………… xvi List of Figures …………………………………………………………………… xx Chapter 1 Introduction 1.0 Reason for the study ………………………………………………………... 1 1.1 Outline of the study ………………………………………………………... 2 1.2 General sociolinguistic interest of the study ……………………………... .. 4 vii 1.3 Definitions …..…………………………………………………… 6 1.3.1 Norman ……………………………………………………..... 6 1.3.2 Regional French of Normandy……...……………………............ 9 1.4 Linguistic differences between (Standard) French and Norman ….... 10 1.5 Differences in perception between varieties …..……................................. 14 1.5.1 Differences in perception between (Standard) French, RFN and Norman ……...……………………............................................................. 14 1.5.2 Differences in perception between Standard French and RFN..... 17 1.6 A major question: which Norman features come into RFN? .................. 19 1.7 Variables considered during the pilot study …………………................... 19 1.7.1 Phonological variables ………………………………………...... 20 1.7.1.1 Phonological variables included in the study ………….. 20 1.7.1.2 Phonological variables not included in the study ……. 21 1.7.2 (Morpho-)syntactic and lexical variables (not included in this study) ………………………………………………... 23 1.8 Relationship to other current research …………………............................ 23 Chapter 2 Methodology 2.0 Introduction ……………………………………………………………… 26 2.1 The study-sites ……………………………………………………………… 26 2.1.1 A word on the territorial division of France ……………...... 26 2.1.2 Selection of the study-sites …………………..……………...... 29 2.1.3 ‘La Bonneville’: the rural Manche …………..……………...... 32 viii 2.1.3.1 Population …………………………………………..……. 35 2.1.3.2 The physical geography of the Cotentin …..……..……. 37 2.1.3.3 Recent history ………………………….…..……..……. 38 2.1.3.4 Unity of the area ………………………….…..……..……. 40 2.1.3.5 Demography and communications …………..……..……. 42 2.1.3.6 Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte ……..…………..……..……. 43 2.1.3.7 Sainte-Mère-Église …….……..…………..……..……. 46 2.1.3.8 The sample villages …….……..…………..………….. 47 2.1.4 Darnétal: urban Seine-Maritime …………..……………......... 49 2.1.4.1 History and social profile ..…..…………..………….. 51 2.1.4.2 Wartime history ……………....…..…………..………….. 54 2.1.4.3 Darnétal today: ‘une ville où on est bien’ ……..………….. 55 2.2 Interviewing procedures ………………………………………………… 59 2.2.1 The fieldwork period ………………………………………...... 59 2.3 Social variables in the study …………………………………………… 62 2.3.1 Social variable: site ………………………………………...... 62 2.3.2 Social variable: age-groups ………………………………...... 63 2.3.3 Social variable: Socioeconomic Class (SEC) ……………...... 64 2.4 Selection of informants for inclusion in the final sample ………… 70 2.5 Recording in this study ……………………………………...………… 73 2.6 Interview protocol ……..……………………………………...………… 74 2.7 Vowel-coding in this study .…………………………………...…………