The loss of Quebec to Great Britain in 1763, the sale of Louisiana to the United States four decades later, and low levels of emigration from France to North America in the 19th century all serve to mask the major role played by French speakers in the European settlement of the continent in the 17th and 18th centuries, the linguistic consequences of which are still with us. In this fine collection of studies, the picture that emerges of French in North America today is one of contrasts: successful efforts to reverse language shift in Quebec, varying degrees of failure elsewhere.
Poirier, Boivin, Trépanier & Verreault 1994 gave us the first general overview of the French linguistic legacy in North America. Valdman and his team have updated that work, incorporating the findings of sociolinguistic research carried out over the past decade, notably in language obsolescence. The result is comprehensive treatment of all the main areas of North America where French is spoken (with the exception of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon, which, constitutionally, remains part of metropolitan France). It is well organized, with an introductory chapter (pp. 1–35) providing a succinct overview of the four sections to follow: The first (37–240) describes where, how, and to what extent French is spoken in North America; the second (243–370) examines language variation in each of these areas and the effects of language contact; the third (371–478) looks at linguistic norms and language planning; and a fourth (479–580) is devoted to more general comparative and historical issues.
The first part of Section One deals with the main strongholds of French in North America, opening, appropriately, with a study by Auger of French in Quebec (39–75). She outlines the current sociolinguistic situation in the province, paying attention to links with other communities of French speakers in America and Europe. Her description of the chief linguistic characteristics of Quebec French contains a useful discussion of current opinion regarding their origins: It has long been thought that the shape of the dialect was established by the features of western Gallo-Romance introduced by the early settlers, but recent work gives a greater role to the colloquial speech of 17th-century Paris, whence, we now know, a large proportion of emigrants originated. The chapter concludes with a discussion of standardization and the successful policy of language planning engaged in during the past half-century. Four articles follow on areas of North America with reasonably large communities of speakers: Acadia (Lise Dubois, 81–98), Ontario (Terry Nadasdi, 99–116), New England and New York state (Cynthia Fox & Jane Smith, 117–42), and Louisiana (Michael Picone & Albert Valdman, 143–68). The French of Acadia, for centuries rather distinct from the speech of Quebec, looks set to survive only by switching to Quebecois norms, while the “Cajun” speech of Louisiana, derived from that of Acadia, seems engaged on a path of folklorization. The second part of Section One considers smaller and more vulnerable French-speaking communities, each placed in a different sociolinguistic situation – isolated without institutional support in the United States (Valdman, 207–28), isolated with institutional support in the Canadian West (Douglas Walker, 187–206), isolated but with the chance of linkage to a larger French-speaking group in Newfoundland (Ruth King & Gary Butler, 169–86), or isolated but without severe pressure from English on the island of Saint-Barthélémy (Robert Chaudenson, 220–41).
Section Two presents six case studies illustrating structural developments in the French used in minority situations. Three concern Louisiana French: Keith Rottet (243–60) considers language obsolescence in the dialect of Bassin Lafourche and provides a neat demonstration of the effects of stylistic reduction (vernacularization), morphological simplification, and interference phenomena. Sylvie Dubois (287–305) examines the data resulting from a 1997 survey of Cajun French speakers born between 1890 and 1977, observing a reduction of variation in morphology and its persistence in phonetics and phonology. Thomas Klinger (349–67) looks at speakers' perceptions of the relationship between Cajun French (with its 200,000 speakers) and Louisiana Creole (30,000 speakers). The structures of the two varieties are widely different, but they meet in the middle to form a continuum, with Black speakers calling their Cajun “Creole,” and white speakers calling it “Cajun.” Three studies examine French in minority contact situations in Canada. Raymond Mougeon (261–85), in a characteristically well-documented study, examines differential processes of devernacularization in groups of adolescents living in English-speaking parts of Canada. Marie-Eve Perrot (307–22) examines a corpus of real-time data from Moncton indicating the attitudes of 16- to19-year-olds to the Chiac dialect (intermediary between standard French and traditional Acadian, with considerable input from English). She notes a significant upswing in favor of Chiac between 1991 and 2001. Robert Papen (327–47) contributes a highly interesting chapter on a mixed dialect of French and the indigenous language Cree, known as “Mitchif” and spoken in the Great Plains. The “miraculous” feature of this dialect is the systematicity of the mixture: French provides the NP and Cree the VP; French provides the modifiers and Cree the heads.
Section Three deals with issues of norms and language planning. Michel Francard (371–88) brings his Belgian experience to bear upon the problems of linguistic norms in Quebec and Acadia, stressing the importance of subjective evaluations of language. While the Québécois seem to have resolved their problems of alienation from both English and Parisian French, their success has created difficulties elsewhere, notably in Acadia, where speakers are faced with a choice of accepting Quebec norms or developing their own, based on Chiac. The difficulties raised by attempts to promote this hitherto stigmatized vernacular in the public sphere are examined specifically by Annette Boudreau (439–54). Analogous problems are faced by the language planners attempting to standardize vernacular usage in Louisiana. Becky Brown (389–409) adopts the analytical framework for standardization elaborated by Milroy & Milroy 1999 and notes the developing preference for community norms located midway between Cajun and Parisian French. Barry Ancelet & Amanda Lafleur take a less circumspect approach (411–37), urging a robust institutional framework for the defense of Cajun. Flore Zéphir (455–75) relates norms to network structure in her interesting description of the roles of French and Creole in the speech of immigrants into the United States from Haiti. Groups not integrated into the mainstream of American life replicate to a considerable extent the French/Haitian Creole diglossia of their island of origin, with, however, the addition of the role of Creole as an ethnic identity marker.
The final section of the book offers valuable synthetic studies of the varieties of French found in North America. In an important paper, Ingrid Neumann-Holzschuh (479–503) looks at the relationships between the three varieties of Acadian, spoken respectively in New Brunswick, Newfoundland, and Louisiana, as manifested in variations affecting the system of personal pronouns. Two articles (by Robert Chaudenson, 505–16, and by Steve Canac-Marquis & Claude Poirier, 517–38) bear upon the variety of metropolitan French taken to North America by the early settlers, and both adopt the view that koineization had occurred in the colloquial speech of France itself before crossing the Atlantic. The book concludes with two comparative studies of lexical data. Robert Vezina (539–64) studies the development of Missouri French on the basis of a glossary collected in the 1930s. He notes a primary affiliation to the French of Quebec and not to that of Louisiana, which, thanks to the Mississippi River, was a good deal more accessible. The explanation is to be found in historical patterns of settlement. Pierre Rézeau, armed with a rich knowledge of French regional vocabulary, analyzes a set of French lexical items culled from a variety of sources on both sides of the Atlantic (565–83). He divides them into words peculiar to North American French and words present in both North American and European French, enabling us to flesh out our understanding of the historical development of the words in question.
It is possible to point to improvements that could have been incorporated into the volume. There are occasional production blemishes (the map on pp. 84–85 is hard to read, and there are avoidable printer's errors on pp. 16–177, 25–26, 118, 121, and 151); a general index and common bibliography could have highlighted the high level of commonality across the articles published. However, with its series of rich bibliographies accompanying articles of almost uniformly high quality, this volume offers an invaluable tool not only for students of French but also for sociolinguists concerned with the effects of language contact, language change, and language obsolescence.
