The Oxford Handbook of the French Language constitutes an ambitious project that aims “to expose readers to a wide range of subfields of French linguistics”; the impressive size of the handbook is demonstrative of the broad reach of the volume.
The editors are undoubtedly aware of the challenges of such an enterprise. First, there exists a tension between their subject, French linguistics, and the medium (English) through which it is presented to reach a wider audience. Further, little research to date has dealt with the Global South despite its increasing importance within la Francophonie, and a laudable attempt has been made to include it in the volume. Finally, the study of French is framed differently in France with a tripartite literature, language and civilization configuration, in the UK where the focus tends to remain on language and literature, and in North America where applied linguistics holds a more focal role. As a result, this handbook presents a wider than usual panorama of the French Language with the explicit objective “to encourage dialogue between scholars working in Francophone and Anglophone contexts”.
The handbook is divided into seven sections of different lengths covering (1) the structures of French; (2) the history of French; (3) axes of variation; (4) French around the world; (5) French in contact with other languages; (6) second language acquisition and (7) French literature, culture, arts and the media.
The first section addresses traditional subdivisions of language studies: phonetics, phonology and orthography (Delais-Roussarie), morphology and syntax (McLaughlin), and semantics and pragmatics (Huyghe & Legallois). Delais-Roussarie’s contribution offers a general overview of the workings of French phonology, and, to a lesser extent, of phonetics, and orthography. McLaughlin provides a descriptive account of French morphology and syntax, with valuable highlights of areas of consensus and discord within the disciplines. Huyghe and Legallois concentrate on a few topics (spatial relations, quantification, tenses and the tu/vous distribution) central to the semantic and pragmatic organization of French, while displaying some interesting language-specific variation. The section provides an initial description of French that frames the book.
The second (longer) section is devoted to the history of French. Caron’s external history of French provides a diachronic presentation of the making of French that adopts a more nuanced approach than the traditional subdivisions in Old, Middle etc. French. Ayres-Bennett complements the overview with a survey of language-related legislation in France focusing both on status- and corpus-planning. Walsh & Kirbee bring a more language-centred outlook to the discussion by presenting the role of metalinguistic texts in the making of French. A summary of sound change (mainly) and orthographic change in French is provided and coupled with suggestions for further research in Rainsford’s chapter. As for Prévost, she discusses the main evolutions in the morphology and syntax of French, including the gradual reduction of the case system, the increase in auxiliary verb structures, and the fixation of word order. This second part closes with Lehman’s contribution, demonstrating how historical semantics explains, systematizes, and categorizes changes in meaning understood alongside the preservation of meanings created and recreated by speakers, generation after generation. To sum up, this ‘history of French’ reinforces the diachronic description with insights from current research.
The third section deals with axes of variation. Armstrong’s initial contribution presents the framework of Anglo-Saxon sociolinguistics with a special focus on the influence of age, gender and social class in specific contexts. Thomas discusses the terminology and theoretical issues relevant to register, genre, and text type in the press, recipes, and scientific texts that she compares. Carruthers discusses advances in theoretical approaches and methodological tools, including the development of spoken corpora and the influence of new digital technologies, before discussing new insights into the working of spoken French through a brief overview of syntactic dislocation and tense switching. Panckhurst, Cougnon and Fairon’s chapter posits the evolution of language use over the past two decades, both within French digital discourse usage and its influence on standardized language. While the methodological aspects of this emerging facet of language study are well presented, the actual impact on language use is only alluded to, which can be expected in a young field such as this. This part thus brings together emerging ways of considering the French Language.
The five chapters in the next section, French around the world are concerned with diatopic variation, starting from the European origins of the language and broadening to include its institutional and geographical developments. Avanzi’s Regional Variation in the French of France presents some theoretical and historical concepts, before illustrating variation through his own crowdsourced data. Thibaut’s chapter focuses on the definition and evolution of the concept of la Francophonie while the remaining three contributors to this section cover specific areas. Racine’s Eurocentric chapter deals on the one hand with Switzerland and Belgium, where French is the first language of large sways of the population, and on the other hand with the Aosta Valley and Luxembourg, where French has increasingly become a foreign language in recent decades, which impacts the way in which future research should be designed. Bullock and Guess’ contribution provides an overview of the diversity of French in North America and describes the specificities and the status of the language in Laurentian and Acadian French, as well as in French in the USA. Akissi-Boutin and Ebongo conclude this section, focussing on the historical implantation, local appropriation and recent creativity in youth language in seventeen sub-Saharan African countries where French is an official language. This international dimension is pursued in the next section devoted to French in contact with other languages.
Smith’s chapter entitled multilingualism chronicles some of the situations and outcomes of French in contact with other languages both historically and today. After a definition of concepts such as borrowing, code-switching, language-mixing, fused lects and translanguaging, the case studies of the Francophone Senegalese diaspora and the French Heritage Language Program in the US are presented. Kremnitz and Boudic’s chapter deals with the languages of France and pursues a double objective: “to give an idea of the importance of the phenomenon of the ‘languages of France’, and to present their typology and describe their respective importance for the past and the present.” Somewhat surprisingly, Froeliger and Loock’s paper focuses on translation and interpretation and highlights the strong institutional support, slow institutionalization, and rapid disruption by new technologies of those professions. Klinger comes back to a more traditional definition of language contact with an historical and linguistic overview of French creoles.
Section six is – unusually in overviews of the French Language - dedicated to language acquisition and opens with Kern’s overview of where, when and how French is learned around the world. This quantitative presentation is followed by three chapters dealing with qualitative language acquisition in the areas of phonetics and phonology (Detey), morphology and syntax (Ayoun), and pragmatics (Tyne and Howard).
The final section addresses the position of French in Literature, culture, arts and the media. The first three chapters examine literature in Middle Ages, Early Modern and Contemporary French. Marnette paints a broad picture of the diatopic, diastratic and diaphasic evolution of Medieval literature. Siouffi continues with an examination of the language in literary texts from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, including how diatopic, diaphasic, and diastratic varieties are used in them. Rosier concludes this first half with a sociostylistic approach, considering the influence of both society and technology on the production and style of literary works, paying special consideration to oral style, speech reporting, and the poetic dimension of language. Abecassis’ contribution focuses on cinematic representations of French throughout the history of cinema. Next, Lesacher offers a sociolinguistic perspective on the French language in music through a study of Francophone rap from Quebec. The section and the handbook close with Burger’s investigation in four parts: analysis of language and the news; language in the news media; the language of the news media, and what journalists say about the language of news.
Nearly 170 pages of bibliography and an index complement the copiously annotated chapters.
This brief presentation does not do justice to the richness and the diversity of the materials presented in this massive handbook. Credit must be given to the editors for bringing to completion such a monumental piece of work involving dozens of contributors. In addition, attention is paid throughout the volume to cross-referencing between chapters, which is in itself a massive task. Perhaps missing is a short postface recapitulating the main outcomes of the enterprise and offering suggestions for further developments, as the handbook ends rather abruptly. Content-wise, some inclusions (for instance the qualitative studies of language acquisition) are unusual for an overview of the French language. Likewise, some groupings (for example the inclusion of translation and interpreting under language contact) are somewhat surprising.
Although the handbook as a whole reflects the editors’ ambitions to broaden the concept of French beyond traditional geographical and disciplinary boundaries, to bring together different traditions and to highlight further avenues for research, this aim is not always met with the same success in individual contributions. Indeed, they differ widely in their scope, depth and presented data, ranging from masterful overviews of the discipline to limited personal research without much consideration for the wider field. These discrepancies make it difficult to identify a target public for the handbook: undergraduate students will benefit from broad brush overviews (with support from their teachers), (junior) researchers from suggestions for further research, academics from introductions to areas outside of their own expertise. In any case, this monumental handbook is probably not meant to be read in a linear manner, as it is not pitched in a uniform way. However, it is certainly a welcome reference book to open the French language to a broader and more heterogenous audience. In these times where French and other languages are being removed from Anglo-Saxon universities, this may be the most valuable contribution of this handbook.
