Our study presents a variationist analysis of lexical variation in L2 immersion in French. Two variables are considered: a) words referringto remunerated work, e.g. travail; b) verbs used to indicate one's place of residence, e.g. habiter.One linguistic factor, priming in the interviewer's question,is shown to condition both variables. A number of social factors arealso considered. The only correlation that obtains with a socialfactor is speakers' home language for the ‘work’ variable.The main finding from our study is that in comparison to L1 Canadian Francophones,the immersion students make use of a limited number of lexical variants and show no knowledge of highly frequent non standard L1 forms.