1 VARIATIONIST SOCIOLINGUISTIC WORK SHOULD BE DONE ON MORE LANGUAGES

Variationism as currently understood began, in a sense, with regional languages in francophone Europe. Gauchat’s (Reference Gauchat1905) apparent-time study of Francoprovençal as spoken in the Swiss village of Charmey is frequently lauded as a pioneering piece of sociolinguistic research (see e.g. Labov, Reference Labov1994: 85–86; Chambers, Reference Chambers1995: 15–16).Footnote ¹ Gauchat’s work was significant enough to attract a real-time follow-up study by Hermann (Reference Hermann1929), but since the variationist turn of the late 1960s attention has been focused predominantly on the anglophone world. Stanford (Reference Stanford2016) is the clearest recent call to action for variationist sociolinguistics to move beyond the English data on which it was mostly born.

There are exceptions to the English generalization, of course. Stanford mentions Sankoff and Cedergren’s pioneering early work in Papua New Guinea (Tok Pisin), Panama City (Spanish) and Montreal (French) (Sankoff, Reference Sankoff1980; Cedergren, Reference Cedergren1973; Vincent, Laforest and Martel, Reference Vincent, Laforest and Martel1995). There is also recent variationist work on endangered languages besides Stanford (Reference Stanford2016): Stanford and Preston (Reference Stanford and Preston2009) and Hildebrandt, Jany and Silva (Reference Hildebrandt, Jany and Silva2017) are good recent examples. The journal Asia-Pacific Language Variation, founded in 2015, now regularly publishes articles on threatened and lesser studied languages alongside dominant ones such as Mandarin and Japanese. However, recent surveys of the sorts of language communities studied in our flagship journals and conference series (cf Nagy and Meyerhoff, Reference Nagy, Meyerhoff, Meyerhoff and Nagy2008; Guy and Adli, Reference Guy and Adli2019) demonstrate that monolingual speakers of dominant European languages remain the bedrock on which our sociolinguistic theorizations are based (e.g. Bell, Reference Bell and Coupland2016).

Of course, ‘working with other languages’ is not as simple as taking a template developed largely on English and fitting the data from other languages into it. When variationists move out of the modern developed-world English-speaking cities in which their universities are likely to be found, and seek to apply their techniques to underrepresented languages, there are very likely to be social challenges as well as linguistic ones (Labov, Reference Labov2015; Meyerhoff, Reference Meyerhoff2017; Chirkova et al., Reference Chirkova, Stanford and Wang2018). Underrepresented languages are rarely found either in cities or in the developed world, and are consequently unlikely to follow variationist models developed for use in modern, urban societies with established social hierarchies. Labov himself has warned against such assumptions (Reference Labov2016: 586):

Low speaker numbers, as Müller (Reference Müller, Blauth-Henke and Heinz2011a) points out, pose a further challenge, as does the linguistic heterogeneity which often accompanies the absence of an accepted, codified standard. These factors also cast serious doubt over the usefulness of the statistical tests common in variationist research, because in general – for multivariate analysis, logistic regression and even a simple chi-square test – the more tokens, the better, and modelling can fail or mislead if token numbers are too low.

However, as this volume demonstrates, these social and statistical challenges are not insuperable, and if linguists are willing to take up the challenge of overcoming them, the rewards can be great (as Labov, Reference Labov2015 and Meyerhoff, Reference Meyerhoff2017 have argued). A number of articles in this issue have necessarily had to adapt traditional variationist research designs for new contexts, and this has meant grappling with issues such as sample representativity and low token counts. Burnett’s article for instance uses historical data from the Atlas linguistique de la France (Gilliéron and Edmont, Reference Gilliéron and Edmont1902–1910) to test the hypothesis that variable mie-dropping (i.e. secondary negation) in moribund northern oïl varieties can be shown to be conditioned by the same sorts of probabilistic factors that constrain morpho-syntactic variation in synchronic studies. She demonstrates that generalized linear mixed-effects modelling can be used in spite of the atlas’ very small and highly variable sample of the phenomenon she investigates. Her work echoes Trudgill (Reference Trudgill1999: 319) in reminding us not to ignore low token counts; in this case a small sample can be rigorously investigated to establish what social life of language may yet be explored in the historical record, thus also contributing to the relatively young field of historical sociolinguistics.

2 THEORIES SHOULD BE TESTED ON OTHER LANGUAGES

Since Chomsky (Reference Chomsky1967: 7) at least, linguistics has generally held its theories to be ‘systems of hypotheses concerning the general features of human language’. It follows from this that the theories should be tested on the widest possible range of languages, to get as close as possible to explanatory adequacy in Chomsky’s terms. For many years from the beginning of generative linguistics, however, theories tended to be formulated on English or another major language of the Western world, and not explicitly tested on a lesser known language. This Special Issue is broadly sociolinguistic in orientation, and our contention as editors is not simply that excessive anglocentrism in sociolinguistics is limiting and dangerous, though this is undoubtedly the case (as others have argued, e.g. Smakman, Reference Smakman, Smakman and Heinreich2015). We also feel a Special Issue on the LRs is timely because these languages raise questions of a different order from those of the major, standardized languages with which linguists happen to be most familiar, and which, as Trudgill (Reference Trudgill2011) has pointed out, are historically atypical on a number of levels. Far from being outliers of little theoretical interest, minority, threatened languages spoken in peripheral areas within modern nation-states, often with a longer historical pedigree than their more powerful neighbours, are precisely where the sociolinguist’s attention should be directed. And yet, while the birth of the Journal of French Language Studies in 1991 testified to a desire to focus scholarly attention on languages other than English, minority languages are still only rarely the objects of theoretical reflection. This was enough of a problem that Smith and Maiden (Reference Smith and Maiden1995: x) felt it necessary to point out that their volume, Linguistic Theory and the Romance Languages, was an exception to the rule. Fortunately, in recent years, LRs have been the subject of a growing amount of theoretical and instrumental work which explicitly seeks to integrate findings about them into our cross-linguistic knowledge.

Picard, the subject of two contributions to this volume, is the LR which has perhaps contributed most to advancing linguistic theory. This is especially true in phonetics and phonology, starting with the work of Fernand Carton from the 1970s onwards (e.g. Carton, Reference Carton1981). In recent years, Julie Auger, the co-author of a contribution to this volume, and her many collaborators and students have been working with Picard to both test and advance theorizations in linguistics, both in ‘phon-phon’ (e.g. Hendrickson, Reference Hendrickson2013; Dow, Reference Dow2014) and in other areas, particularly the separation of closely-related grammars (Auger and Villeneuve, Reference Auger, VIlleneuve, Meyerhoff and Nagy2008; Villeneuve and Auger, Reference Villeneuve and Auger2013).

A phonetic category which has received considerable attention in the LR literature recently is that of the laterals, particularly in relation to Occitan and related varieties (e.g. Müller Reference Müller, Blauth-Henke and Heinz2011a,b). In the current volume, Mooney and Hawkey identify a merger of the palatal lateral approximant /ʎ/ and the median approximant /j/ in both Occitan and Catalan, which they diagnose through a synchronic analysis of variation between the two variants. The study of this merger in the context of language contact is fruitful, as French underwent the merger in the nineteenth century, and so the context provides fertile ground for comparative sociolinguistic analysis. In this study, the authors ask whether the change can be attributed to contact effects, or whether it is in fact internally motivated, given that /ʎ/ > [j] is commonly attested in Romance (see e.g. Wheeler, Reference Wheeler, Harris and Vincent1988). Interference of the kind studied in that work, between closely related but independent L1 and L2 phonological systems, can only be explored in the context of contact between a dominant language and a dominated one, of which France, with its long tradition of linguistic centralism, offers plenty of examples.

France’s LRs also offer fertile ground on which to test and better understand advancements in phonetics and phonology from a diachronic perspective. While it is a study in historical phonology rather than variationist sociolinguistics, Egurtzegi’s paper nevertheless has linguistic variation in a minority language at its core. The paper analyses the genesis of word-initial aspirated voiceless stops in the three varieties of Basque spoken in France (Eastern Basque). Unlike the Basque varieties of Spain, those of France are severely endangered. The varieties of France are also of interest because they preserve two features considered to be archaic in Basque as a whole: aspirated voiceless stops, and some survival of historical *h as /h/. Contemporary Spanish Basque varieties have no aspirated voiceless stops, and have lost *h. Word-initial aspirated voiceless stops are argued in the literature to have arisen through a process of anticipatory voicelessness, whereby an original word-initial unaspirated voiced stop, followed in the next syllable by a voiceless stop, becomes voiceless through the spread of [-voiced]. Egurtzegi instead proposes that Eastern Basque word-initial aspirated voiceless stops arise by a process of perceptual metathesis, whereby speakers hear aspiration on a stop near the beginning of relevant words, and perceive it as originating on the first stop and not the second. The proposed analysis improves our explanation of the origin of Western Basque word-initial aspirated voiceless stops in at least three ways. It accounts for an environment where aspiration does not occur (where the voiceless stop in the second syllable is preceded by a sibilant); it makes our account of aspirate dissimilation in Basque more economical, in that it need not now apply in one direction but not the other; and it offers an explanation of 70-year-old observations of devoiced word-initial lenis stops, which are otherwise difficult to fit into contemporary theory. Once again, then, evidence bearing on old problems in LRs sheds light on modern phonology.

Syntactic theories and methods developed on more major languages have also been tested and extended through application to minority languages. In this issue, as we have seen, Burnett presents a quantitative analysis and syntactic reconstruction of negation markers in moribund oïl varieties based on historical evidence. Fifteen years ago, we saw the same in Haddican’s syntactic and morphosyntactic work on Basque (Haddican, Reference Haddican2005; Reference Haddican2007). This work has also shown that, notwithstanding the reserve previously expressed about how minority-language communities can be different from majority language ones, some situations can be found where sociolinguistic theory developed on major languages does apply in the minority context. Aurrekoetxea’s (Reference Aurrekoetxea, Heselwood and Upton2010) computational work for instance shows that there is a demonstrable correlation between non-standard lexicon and non-standard morphology, phonology or syntax in different varieties of Basque, as has been demonstrated in more well-studied languages.

While many of these studies have focused on the oldest generation of LR speakers, a common thread that underpins a body of recent work on LRs relates to learners of threatened minority varieties, too, and their role in shaping the sociolinguistic field.

3 STANDARDIZATION WITHOUT ACCEPTANCE?

Much sociolinguistic research has been conducted in societies, often anglophone, where the notion of a standard or prestige variety can be more or less taken as a given. Standard language ideology in Western societies is commonly understood to be encultured and propagated by the dominant bloc made up of four key proponents (Education, Media, Entertainment, Industry), who belong to a larger power construct designed to maintain the dominant position of societal elites (Fairclough, Reference Fairclough1989; Lippi-Green, Reference Lippi-Green1994). This is particularly true of France, which, it has long been argued, has ‘probably the most highly focused society in Europe, with Paris eclipsing regional economic and cultural centres to a greater extent than any other European capital’ (Lodge, Reference Lodge1993: 228–229, cited in Durand et al. Reference Durand, Eychenne, Lyche, Jones and Hornsby2013: 66). We need only look at the 2017 row over écriture inclusive, reaching as far as the Prime Minister, to see how attached the French state remains to standardization of the national language (Circulaire du 21 novembre 2017 relative aux règles de féminisation et de rédaction des textes publiés au Journal officiel de la République française; and, for a historical overview; see Schiffman, Reference Schiffman1996). The standardization and reification of French in France has gone hand-in-hand with historical attempts to stamp out the varieties previously officially, and still widely unofficially, known as the patois (see de Certeau et al., Reference Certeau, de, Julia and Revel1975). These attempts have had profoundly negative consequences for the present state of the underrepresented languages discussed here, even if some commentators (e.g. Oakes, Reference Oakes2017) are now more optimistic than they were. It is certainly ironic that, on the one hand, the state can be seen as using linguistic purism to justify official hostility to all other languages spoken in the Hexagon, while, on the other, some LR activists can imply that the very same purism is a sine qua non for the LRs’ very survival (Woolard, Reference Woolard, Schieffelin, Woolard and Kroskrity1998: 18; Hornsby, this volume).

Not all LRs, however, have embraced the notion of a single standard variety. As with all natural languages, France’s LRs are all marked by diversity in their vernaculars. In all of these cases, standards do exist (or have been proposed), but they do not always enjoy full acceptance in Haugen’s (Reference Haugen1966) terms. As LR activists are acutely aware, the stakes are high, and the issues complex. While a standard Breton that enjoyed the acceptance of its Welsh cousin might be sure to survive in the medium term, the imposition of a pan-lectal standard variety seen to be the creation of intellectuals might ultimately secure for it a very different fate. Critics of Breton standardization (e.g. Jones, Reference Jones1995) have lamented over-zealous attempts to artificially purify the language by stripping it of its non-Celtic roots, thereby ‘distanciating’ (Thiers, Reference Thiers, Posner and Green1993: 265) it from the bulk of its native speakers and raising the very question of whether an LR standard can ever command widespread acceptance.

The question of who does and does not engage in processes of standardization is, of course, a serious matter, which provides the central theme of Lane, Costa and De Korne’s (Reference Lane, Costa and De Korne2018) wide-ranging survey of standardization in minority languages, and is further developed here by a number of our contributors. The difficulty for activists, of course, is standardizing an ‘L’ (Low) language in the absence of a recognized and readily available elite model group (higher status individuals being generally the first to abandon L for the economic and social advantages of the ‘H’ (High) variety). In Haugen’s (Reference Haugen1966) terms, this generally amounts to standardization without the (spontaneous) selection of norms or acceptance which are usually seen as essential for success. The dilemma is neatly encapsulated by the case of Picard, which is explored from contrasting perspectives in this volume. On the one hand, as Auger and Villeneuve demonstrate in this volume, some speakers clearly use and recognize varieties which are identifiably Picard, maintaining norms which are distinct from French in their treatment of a number of grammatical variables shared with the national language. On the other hand, Hornsby argues here that internal divisions and long-term convergence with French are now so entrenched, elsewhere in the picardophone area, that the distanciating zeal of activists promoting regional-language status impacts negatively in practice on intergenerational transmission, and therefore poses an existential threat to Picard itself. Of course, this dilemma poses further questions when we investigate the effect of standardization on variation: to the extent that standardization is effective, variation should be reduced, so those who engage less deeply with standardization may show more variation in their production patterns and vice versa. Recent research on the production patterns of speakers of standardized varieties, however, does not appear to support this hypothesis.

4 NÉOLOCUTEURS AS A NEW LR ELITE

In the context of LRs, we cannot talk about standardization without also talking about people who reside in the areas where these languages are spoken, who may have even been raised in these areas, but who did not grow up speaking the languages: ‘Xmen without Xish’, in Fishman’s terms (Fishman, Reference Fishman1991: 11ff). Such speakers can pose a challenge for standardization efforts, because, for many minority languages, it has been unproblematically assumed that a single standard variety would help learners to learn them.Footnote ² As outlined above, there is often then the question of which variety of the minority language the standard should be based on. The growing importance of néolocuteurs within these LR communities also poses some fundamental questions about the relationship between these speakers – often young, urban, well-educated and skilled – and ‘traditional’ speakers, generally older, often rural-dwelling and/or isolated and working class (cf Pooley, Reference Pooley2000; Kasstan, Reference Kasstan2017).

It is worth pausing on the term néolocuteur, which might be literally translated into English as ‘new speaker’. The term is not without ideological complications (for a discussion, see e.g. M. Hornsby, Reference Hornsby2015):

Whatever the terminological problems, Kasstan (Reference Kasstan2017), in his review of the ‘new speaker’ literature and concept, points out that minority language communities have included people who would now be called ‘new speakers’ for far longer than the ‘new speaker’ label has been used in sociolinguistics. The question of new speakers is therefore of enduring and increasing interest in sociolinguistics, as the existence of the EU-funded New Speakers Network and its burgeoning inventory of publications show (COST, 2013).

The discussion around new speakers is significant, as sociolinguistics (notably in its variationist guise) has generally paid little attention to learners. In many ways, First Wave variationist studies had carried on a tradition pursued by Chomsky (and Martinet before him) of totemizing the native speaker as the object of study, even if the analytical lens had shifted from the idiolect to the speech community. Labov has demonstrated that the vernacular as the first learned variety would demonstrate the most systematic patterns of variation, and his principles of linguistic methodology are predicated on the cognitive primacy of the vernacular (e.g. Labov, Reference Labov1971). Since the 1970s, too, the privileged position of the native speaker in sociolinguistics has remained remarkably consistent. Chambers and Trudgill’s (Reference Chambers and Trudgill1998: 29) NORMs (‘non-mobile older rural males’) remain conceptually unchanged from Fishman’s (Reference Fishman1972: 69) characterization: ‘the image of the noble and uncontaminated peasant, who had kept the language pure and intact’. Variationism, which emerged in part at least from a tradition of generativism, has therefore tended to focus on the linguistic practices of native speakers, seeing them as the most traditional, authentic, and legitimate representatives of the speech community (see Bucholtz, Reference Bucholtz2003). Therefore, conventional wisdom has viewed learners as having little influence on the development of LRs, because of their reliance on artificial standardized varieties which are divorced from those of traditional speakers, and perceived as inauthentic by the latter. In this volume, Kennard considers the context of Breton, where generations of néo-Bretonnants have been raised in the Diwan Breton-medium schooling programme since the 1970s using a modern standardized Breton. As she points out, much of the sociolinguistic work on Breton has focused on interactional analyses comparing the practices and attitudes of traditional Breton speakers and Diwan-educated speakers. In her review of the literature, these néo-Bretonnants are cited as using an artificially restructured language that is inaccessible to those who acquired Breton via more traditional transmission, and these perceived linguistic differences are said to exacerbate community divisions.Footnote ³ Such a context does however provide fertile ground on which to test predictions about language production among new speakers: i.e. whether they orient to a standard norm against an L1 Breton baseline, or whether they are more influenced by Reference French, given their comparatively limited input within the Diwan setting. In particular, Kennard’s paper focuses on how these speakers use impersonal verb constructions and nominal mutations in structured elicitation tasks. Her analysis reveals only small and subtle differences across speaker types for both variables, which is surprising given the extent of the literature highlighting the linguistic divides that allegedly distinguish Diwan and non-Diwan-educated Breton speakers (see also Kennard and Lahiri, Reference Kennard and Lahiri2017). Similarly, only little influence from French in the aggregate is observed. Owing to these observations contra the weight of qualitative work on Breton, Kennard’s paper illustrates the importance of bridging variationist methodology with research on endangered languages in order to eschew essentializing discourses around native-speaker ideology. While stylistic variation was not rigorously tested here, there are kernels of evidence to suggest that some instances of variable impersonal forms can be linked with social constructivism. This would constitute further tantalizing evidence that new speakers can emerge as important agents of change in endangered-language contexts, playing a more central role than has so far been appreciated in the development and survival of LRs (see Kasstan, Reference Kasstan2019 on Francoprovençal).

We alluded above to the absence in minority or threatened language communities of what Trudeau (Reference Trudeau1992) has termed a norme spontanée, emerging ‘naturally’ by virtue of an association with a social elite (the Parisian aristocracy in the case of standard French). In the case of LRs, of course, the absence of such an elite deprives the dominated language of a model of ‘good’ speech around which the speech community can cohere. But, as Kasstan (Reference Kasstan2019) demonstrates, in the modern, interconnected, digital world, néolocuteurs are able to communicate regularly and rapidly with like-minded individuals across the LR region in question. This contrasts sharply with the usual LR communication habits of many traditional speakers, which are at the level of the village or small town (speakers typically switch to French outside the home domain). Communication over distance, when it occurs in the néolocuteur’s L2, can favour pan-regional forms rather than highly localized ones, whether or not these are described or promoted as part of a ‘standard’ (a label not infrequently rejected by new speakers involved in revitalization movements, as in the case of Francoprovençal). Of course, there is nothing surprising about a preference for pan-regional forms among more mobile speakers with looser social networks: witness for example the adoption of supralocal forms in Newcastle, led by younger middle-class women (Milroy et al., Reference Milroy, Milroy, Hartley and Walshaw1994). But this development has profound implications in the context of LRs, because evidence, from France and elsewhere, suggests that the social advantages enjoyed by many new-speaker activists lend prestige to the levelled forms that they tend to prefer, in spite of their artificiality from the perspective of older, traditional fluent speakers.Footnote ⁴ It is ironic that LRs may be finding the elites they have never had, and the bases for future standardization, among the very speakers who might seem superficially to be least equipped to ensure their continued survival.

5 THE INFLUENCE OF FRENCH ON THE LANGUES RÉGIONALES

In any context of language contact and shift, there is the potential for the majority language to influence the structure of the minority one, and vice versa. Thomason (Reference Thomason2001: 76ff) lists some general tendencies. For her, markedness seems to be the most important factor in determining which structures will be affected. Intensity of contact also plays a crucial role in determining the extent of influence, as does imperfect learning (again of the minority language, in this case). All of these tendencies can be tested in the French situation. There has long been intense contact between the LRs and French, since the LRs now exist in a society which is entirely French-speaking (or has another majority language, for those LRs whose areas cross borders).

The literature contains more research on some LRs than on others, as far as contact with French is concerned. Among the most common outcomes of contact-induced change outlined by Thomason is loss of phonological features; more specifically, ‘lost phonemes typically merge with other phonemes rather than disappearing entirely’ (Reference Thomason2001: 88). To return to Mooney and Hawkey’s paper in this volume, variable production of /ʎ/, which they posit to represent an intermediate stage in the merger of the two phones, is also documented in French and other Romance languages. The authors argue that this change has traditionally been interpreted as internally motivated. This then prompts the question of whether or not the variable lateral production in two obsolescent varieties can be attributed to the same cause, or whether external forces associated with language contact can also be predicted to be motivating any shift from the palatal to the median approximant. Mooney and Hawkey’s comparative study demonstrates that, while there is advanced merger in both contexts, different explanatory factors emerge from mixed-effects logistic-regression modelling. While contact with French in both cases emerges as an important predictor of merger, the Catalan analysis captures the mechanisms of this change in a more nuanced way. Among the oldest Catalan speakers, the authors demonstrate some evidence that the distributional constraints on [j] in French have been transferred from Catalan and are operating on the merger. However, among the youngest speakers, this change is now progressing independently.

These observations support earlier work on Occitan, too. For instance, Mooney (Reference Mooney2017) finds a merger as a result of contact in the Occitan of Occitan-French bilinguals, and provides a further good example of data from underrepresented languages being used to test and advance general linguistic theory, as the merger of Occitan back mid-vowels discussed here is analysed as an example of equivalence classification by speakers who speak both Occitan and French. For Mooney, even though the back mid-vowels of those two languages are not the same, they are similar enough that it is plausible that bilinguals see them as equivalent, if not identical.

Occitan’s phonemic inventory (and specifically its lateral consonants) is also the subject of a wide-ranging study by Müller (Reference Müller2011b). In some dialects she finds a shift from /ɫ/ towards /l/, and ascribes it to contact not only with French but also with more prestigious varieties of Occitan. We find here an illustration of the pervasive effect of prestige in contact situations, showing that the donor variety in a situation of change does not have to be a more prestigious language, but can also be a more prestigious variety of what is still a less prestigious language on the social hierarchy.

Hinzelin (Reference Hinzelin2018), on phonological change in Francoprovençal induced by contact with French, concludes that ‘strong and constant pressure from French spanning several centuries’ (p. 69) is responsible for certain changes in the Francoprovençal consonant inventory. He notes, importantly, that Francoprovençal is an example of a situation where the contact and resulting change is longer established than might be assumed: evidence again taken from Gilliéron and Edmont (Reference Gilliéron and Edmont1902–10) shows that some of the changes he documents were underway when the atlas was produced. Coincidentally, one of the changes Hinzelin analyses is in Francoprovençal laterals (/ʎ/ > /l/), and Kasstan and Müller (Reference Kasstan and Müller2018), in the same volume, also deals with the levelling of varied surface forms of Francoprovençal /ʎ/. In this volume, both Mooney and Hawkey, and Auger and Villeneuve, explore different notions of ‘difference’ between varieties which are structurally similar. Auger and Villeneuve in particular find examples of similar syntactic constructions in French and in the Picard of the Vimeu region, but find them subject to radically different constraints.

6 THE SOCIOLINGUISTICS OF FRANCE

Research of the type we highlight in this issue can also usefully complement existing research on the sociolinguistics of France. Sociolinguistics undertaken in France is heavily biased towards what the Anglo-Saxon tradition often calls ‘sociology of language’, ‘ethnography of communication’ or other labels (Coupland and Jaworski, Reference Coupland, Jaworski, Coupland and Jaworski1997: 1), i.e. the investigation of the social positioning and context of languages. As Hymes (Reference Hymes1974) remarked nearly half a century ago, it is unhelpful to set up an opposition between this tradition of sociolinguistics and ‘quantitative sociolinguistics’, because of course sociology of language often uses quantitative measures to compare linguistic practices. However, sociology of language does not use instrumental phonetic methods (as variationist sociolinguistics has done since Labov, Yaeger and Steiner, Reference Labov, Yaeger and Steiner1972) or, usually, advanced statistical methods (central to variationist methodology since the advent of VARBRUL in the mid-1970s; see Sankoff and Labov, Reference Sankoff and Labov1979). This leaves a gap for the study of LRs from a variationist perspective, which this volume, among others, is now attempting to bridge, but the difference between the conceptions of ‘sociolinguistics’ in the English-speaking world and sociolinguistique in France is still striking. It is demonstrated, for example, by the dearth of variationist work on the Hexagon found in the crucial Bibliographie sociolinguistique francophone (see also Gadet, Reference Gadet1996; Detey et al. Reference Detey, Durand, Laks and Lyche2016). We do not mean to suggest that at present there is no research on French sociolinguistics from variationist or other theoretical standpoints, or that there is no sociology of language research in English on the LRs. On the contrary: there has been variationist work on French since Gillian Sankoff’s work in the early 1970s, and formal linguistic work on e.g. Jersey Norman from at least the late 1950s (e.g. Spence, Reference Spence1957). There has been sociology of language research in English on the LRs since at least Tabouret-Keller (Reference Tabouret-Keller1981),Footnote ⁵ and much work more recently, as discussed above. But we can at least say that formal-linguistic research in English on the LRs, as in this volume, is comparatively rare, certainly by comparison with the growing interest in formal approaches to variation in dominant-language context (e.g. Cornips and Corrigan, Reference Cornips and Corrigan2005).

Formal sociolinguistic work on the LRs as presented in this volume, therefore, offers a new dimension to existing research on the sociolinguistics of France, and, more broadly, a contribution to sociolinguistic theory. Though the papers for this volume have been written in English and in some cases adapt and apply models developed in the Anglo-Saxon world, each, in its own way, draws on francophone traditions in what we believe to be a fruitful fusion, which we hope will stimulate further inquiry into what remains a sorely under-researched area.

NOTE

We thank the many reviewers for their careful work in helping to deliver the articles presented in this issue, as well as Julia Herschensohn, Nigel Armstrong and Laurel Preston for their expertise and support throughout the editorial process.