Les français d’ici en perspective éd. par Davy Bigot et al

Reviewed by: Les français d’ici en perspective éd. par Davy Bigot et al Carly Bahler Bigot, Davy, Denis Liakin, Robert A. Papen, Adel Jebali, Et Mireille Tremblay, éd. Les français d’ici en perspective. PU Laval, 2020. ISBN 978-2-7637-4989-1. Pp. 194. The premier conference on North American French linguistics, the seventh reunion of Les français d’ici (June 2018), produced an eclectic volume of texts, especially appealing to sociolinguists, drawing from corpora across time, space, and modalities. A cross-section of linguistic subfields and methodologies, the work’s repeated themes lend cohesiveness. Article summaries in the foreword are useful, particularly in the absence of abstracts. Wladyslaw Cichocki and Yves Perreault’s dialectological study of New Brunswick is a logical beginning, updating the much-examined question of isoglosses in a region where Francophone communities exist along a Laurentian-Acadian continuum. This article handily foreshadows others: the realization of the phoneme/R/proves paramount in the drawing of isoglosses, and language contact is a pervasive theme. The volume’s three historical studies follow, with no shortage of sociolinguistic implications. Jenelle Thomas takes the reader to Louisiana, ever the laboratory for language contact. Language choice in letters to or from Hispanophone governors in the late eighteenth century is a window into the colony’s multilingualism during the Spanish period, revealing that the distinct status of Spanish and French does not entail strict diglossia. Scholars of historical phonology will enjoy Hugo Saint-Amant Lamy’s acoustic analysis of the evolution of pre-rhotic vowels in twentieth-century Laurentian French (LauF), where previously untapped recordings from the Atlas linguistique de l’est du Canada contribute to the corpus. The pivotal years for the pre-rhotic opening and centralization of seven vowels across Quebec (1919–60) indicate an innovation having spread via the wave model. The temporal correlation between this subtle vocalic change and the adoption of dorsal /ʁ/ in Western Quebec is especially compelling, with anticipatory coarticulation likely at play. Phonetics is again the focus of the final historical study, where Cristina Brancaglion examines recommendations for the oral norm in Quebec French (QF) from Jean-Louis Audet’s Montreal diction program (1930–70). Particularly interesting are the proscribed traits, namely those believed to have resulted from English contact or those deemed too traditional. Dovetailing with Saint-Amant Lamy’s article, the debate over dorsal versus apical rhotic reappears, with Audet’s recommendations evolving. Today, assibilation and high vowel laxing have resisted decades of prescriptivism to become socially neutral, and synonymous with LauF. The volume’s latter studies are synchronic with QF as their optic, while [End Page 261] drawing comparisons elsewhere. While the spoken norm remains central, Anne-José Villeneuve’s variationist analysis of yes/no questions represents a welcome shift to syntax and practitioners will appreciate the article’s pedagogical recommendations. Alice Tremblay’s article on morphologically bare English-origin verbs in Haitian QF is another high point, and a return to Louisiana, where such forms have been treated extensively. Anne Bertrand’s study of vraiment is at the interface of formal semantics, pragmatics, and syntax, while Gretchen McCulloch and Jeffrey Lamontagne study repeated letters in non-standard spellings by Twitter users in Quebec and the Hexagon, finding that users’ “grammaire de répétition” reflects the phonological system of their variety. Most intriguing is the possibility that users in Quebec make particular grapheme-phoneme distinctions, an observation unexpectedly reminiscent of historical studies analyzing the orthography of centuries-old texts. [End Page 262] Carly Bahler Mississippi State University Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French

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