This volume includes 16 papers in honour of Raymond Mougeon, one of the pioneers of Canadian variationist studies, and many of the contributors acknowledge their debt to him, both in terms of conceptualisation of the subject and the new methodologies he developed, some of which are further developed by the contributors. On a theoretical level, Gadet examines the problems presented by French diatopic variation when writing a grammar due to the inherent instability of language. Unsurprisingly, she proclaims the need to combat the tendency to ignore the actual speakers, a balance having to be found between internal structural factors and external ones, including the characteristics of the speakers concerned. Coveney, for his part, examines variationist vs. diglossic descriptive models in the specific context of Standard vs. Colloquial French. His line of argument should be useful in determining whether other linguistic situations come under one label or the other. The possibility of wrongly attributing change to language contact when in reality the source of change was due to a internal innovation is demonstrated by Poplack and Levey, using the subjunctive as an example, they point out that explaining language change through contact is often the easy way out and should be relegated to folk linguistics.
Quantitative studies are fundamental in sociolinguistic studies, but some contributors plead for a complementary quantitative approach, often using the same data. Thus Chambers and Lapierre, examining variants of English in the bilingual belt of Ontario, have developed, following on from Mougeon, a Language Use Index (LUI) which measures subjects’ participation in the language cultures around them, which adds an extra variable to those of gender, sex, class and ethnicity. Similarly, Golembeski pleads for a qualitative approach to the study of ethnolinguistic vitality among Franco-Ontarians, which leads him to establish a hierarchy of the various acceptable French norms in the area. Regan and Nestor examine qualitatively the acquisition of French by Poles who emigrated to France in the 1980s and the transmission of Polish to their children.
Some of the papers aim to check assumptions. Thus Dewaele's examination of the acquisition and use of swear words in L2s and L3s and Walker and Fraser's on loss of liaison in Albertan French confirm what could be expected. On the other hand, Blondeau shows that, contrary to expectations, there is no direct influence of English on the French of Montreal's bilingual Anglophones. This is due to the strength of the French environment and socialisation, which in turn indicates that bilingualism is no longer an individual trait but corresponds to the new communitarianist approach developed by Anglophones. Similarly surprising is Tennant's study of prosodic rhythm in Ontarian French which shows that, although English has had an impact on intonation, this does not seem to be the case for rhythm. Clearly assumptions should be verified however ‘obvious’ they may seem.
The many contributions in this book functioning at a micro level are important theoretically since a study on a limited phenomenon may open new vistas on the subject as a whole. Thus, by studying diachronically the use of back instead of the French re- in Canada and Louisiana, King shows how the increased use of back corresponds to a gradual loss of productivity of re- and that syntactic change in this case is a consequence of semantic change. Still at the micro level, Papen's study of liaison in Mitchif shows how confusion in the past between liaison and elision has led to false conclusions. Clearly no past results should be taken for granted!
Quantitative studies remain, of course, the bread and butter of variationist studies, but historicity is now often added to the picture, with interesting and surprising results. Rottet's study of two unique uses of the Past Conditional in Louisiana French adopts a quantitative approach to analyse the phenomena, but then asks whether these odd uses are the result of internal evolution or due to the contact with the WOULD + Infinitive construction, their English equivalent. He concludes that the latter seems the most probable, but in all likelihood helped by the French preference for analytic rather than synthetic constructions. Similarly Treffers-Daller shows that chercher après, frequently used in Brussels, is partly due to contact with Dutch, but also to the fact it existed as a minority pattern in the history of the French language. Contact with Dutch seems to have turned a minor French pattern into a major one. Historicity can, of course, be considered over a short period, as Sankoff and Thibault demonstrate when examining the use of j'vais, j'vas, m'as and m'en vas between 1971 and 2001. Valdman, moving backwards, suggests that the study of present day Louisiana and Haiti creoles may reveal lost aspects of ‘colonial French’, i.e. the various 17th and 18th century vernaculars from which these creoles developed. Such studies have led to a far more sophisticated interpretation of the impact of languages in contact.
Some readers may find this mixture of ‘macro’ and ‘micro’ approaches disturbing and the fact that this book concentrates on bilingualism and language contact in North America may also be off putting. On the other hand some of the theoretical chapters should be of interest to most sociolinguists and the increased emphasis on combining the quantitative with the qualitative, and the diachronic with the synchronic in often original ways, sometimes thanks to some of the more ‘micro’ contributions, may open up interesting new vistas, particularly for European researchers working in the field of regional and minority languages.
