The work of Gaston Tuaillon has undoubtedly provided many useful insights into the description of regional French (RF). However, his less helpful (Reference Tuaillon1974) definition of the variety as ‘ce qui reste du dialecte quand le dialecte a disparu’ has caused me to use a great deal of red ink when marking students’ essays.
David Hornsby's fresh new perspective on RF will cut my red ink consumption in half, seeking as it does to arrive at a twenty-first century definition of the variety by refusing to characterise it according to what it is not (standard French (SF), dialect) and presenting instead a more scientific investigation of its make-up. The data from his survey come from the mining town of Avion, in the Pas-de-Calais and Hornsby's analysis of the complex, mixed variety (Picard/Regional French) spoken by many of the older residents draws on Trudgill's (Reference Trudgill1986) model of koinéization.
As stated in the Introduction, the book's structure follows the ‘life cycle’ of Picard, tracing the variety from its beginnings (the emergence of the Gallo-Roman dialects and the rise of francien) to its current dedialectalisation. Along the way, we are given a detailed account of its linguistic features, the extent to which these can still be distinguished in the speech of the survey's informants and a comparison of the nature of the emergent variety of Avion with the RF of the North of France. The analysis is meticulous and, although the number of codes used for the different variables and language situations caused me to have to flick back and forth in order to make sure I kept on top of what was being presented, Hornsby is to be congratulated on the wealth of data collected and analysed, which leaves the reader in no doubt as to the solid underpinning of his subsequent conclusions.
The book's central thesis is that dialect and RF variants are more appropriately defined in terms of i) patterns of co-occurrence and ii) speakers. Hornsby suggests that RF variants can occur both with dialect and SF variables and tend to be used by younger speakers. It is further demonstrated how the levelling of pan-Picard forms in Avion have given way to a variety that displays ‘levelling’ of linguistic features by virtue of their association with local working-class vernacular and the book suggests that dialect features are far more likely to remain if they display a regular and predictable relationship with SF equivalents. This, then, provides a more challenging and ‘meaty’ view of RF than a mere temporary holdover of seemingly random dialect forms, and offers a model to be tested by future research.
Hornsby's fresh and exciting new definition of RF is that it represents a koiné distinct from SF but comprehensible to outsiders – by virtue of its systematic variation – in a way that the dialect it is replacing is not. It represents a fascinating contribution to the fields of both Regional French and dialectology.
