Introduction: The Linguistic Study of Acadian French

Introduction: The Linguistic Study of Acadian French Patricia Balcom, Louise Beaulieu, Gary R. Butler, Wladyslaw Cichocki, and Ruth King 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 Valley. 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 je . . . -ons (je parlons ‘we speak’), and the third person plural ils . . . -ont (ils parlont ‘they speak’). This usage began to decline in France centuries ago (Beaulieu and Cichocki, this issue; Flikeid and Péronnet 1989;King 2005). Similarly, the simple-past tense, the passé simple—as in ils 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 pêcheurs qui va à la côte ‘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 provinces. 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 Scotia ranging from Chéticamp, Île Madame, and Pomquet in the northeast of the [End Page 1] 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 Gaspé Peninsula, the Magdalen Islands (Îles-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 varieties 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 Chéticamp 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 differing 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 passé simple has disappeared 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...

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