Language Situation and Language Policy in the Canadian Province of New Brunswick

The analysis of sociolinguistic situation in the Canadian province of New Brunswick is offered in the article. The history of the settlement of this territory by representatives of different linguistic cultures — the French and the British — is considered. An overview of the demo linguistic situation in the province is given. The statistical data of the latest population censuses are presented. Particular attention is paid to the use of the minority French language in various social and communicative spheres in New Brunswick at the present stage: in the legislative and executive branches, in the main sphere of the language functioning — in the sphere of education, in the spheres of services, trade and the media. The author dwells on the problem of variation of the Acadian French language in a situation of institutional bilingualism, when the French language is constantly under the influence of the dominant English language. The relevance of the article is due to the attention of the Russian and world community to the position of minority languages in a multilingual society and the problem of their preservation. The novelty of the research is seen in the fact that the ongoing language policy is considered simultaneously with the analysis of existing laws on language, since only adopted laws can allow members of the linguistic minority to assert and defend their rights.

A comparative analysis of French auxiliation, with new evidence from Montréal

This chapter provides an overview of various auxiliation patterns that occur in French since many dialectological and sociolinguistic studies suggest that in various parts of the Francophonie (in Laurentian and Acadian French, and in certain regions of France and Belgium) native speakers employ both auxiliaries, être BE and avoir HAVE, in the spoken language with the twenty-or-so intransitive verbs that, prescriptively, require the exclusive use of être. The chapter also provides new evidence from a 2016 corpus of spoken Montréal French, which will be contrasted with syntactic/semantic theories of auxiliary selection, and shows that these theoretical approaches are inadequate to account for the Canadian French patterns.

When a linguistic variable doesn’t vary (much): The subjunctive mood in a conservative variety of Acadian French and its relevance to the actuation problem

This study considers the subjunctive mood in one of the most conservative varieties of Acadian French, that spoken in the Baie Sainte-Marie region in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. A number of claims made in the literature are considered: whether the subjunctive mood is undergoing loss, whether it expresses semantic meaning, and whether it is lexically-conditioned. Unlike most spoken varieties of French where the subjunctive is argued to be a linguistic variable (i.e., it varies with other moods), the results for Baie Sainte-Marie show that it varies very little. The analysis reveals that the few cases of variation can be accounted for by formal theoretical approaches to the subjunctive where this mood is argued to express modality. With limited variation, the subjunctive is not showing signs of loss. These findings suggest that the subjunctive is not part of a linguistic variable and so is not subject to inherent variability. I further argue that the retention of the imperfect subjunctive in this variety, along with a tense concordance effect, can help us understand why the subjunctive became a linguistic variable in other varieties of French, which ultimately contributes to our understanding of the actuation problem.

Dialect Contact and the Acadian French Subjunctive: A Cross-Varietal Study

This study investigates mood choice for five Acadian French communities in Atlantic Canada which have intertwined settlement histories but which differ in terms of type and degree of dialect contact. The two communities with least contact with supralocal French preserve the highly salient imperfect subjunctive, moribund or absent from most other present-day spoken French varieties. While four communities exhibit high selection rates for the present subjunctive, in line with variationist analyses of other French varieties, one community has surprisingly low rates of such usage, along with absence of the imperfect subjunctive. This dichotomy is explained by the local prestige of the smaller of two founder groups for the community, settlers from Haute-Bretagne, France, a dialect area for which the historical record reveals low levels of subjunctive forms. The results highlight the importance not only of demographic factors but also of local identity construction in the formation of new contact varieties.

An extension of the comparative sociolinguistics approach for sociosyntax

This paper integrates aspects of both generative theory and variationist sociolinguistics. To compare the structure of two varieties of French (Acadian French and Laurentian French), I adapt the comparative sociolinguistics approach to compare the syntactic structure of these varieties. Specifically, I focus on the effects of a single linguistic constraint across multiple sociolinguistic variables. I argue that such a comparison provides insights into the underlying grammatical structures of the varieties under comparison, differences that may have remained hidden otherwise. To illustrate the approach, I focus on a single constraint, sentential polarity, and I analyze its effects on two sociolinguistic variables, yes/no questions and future temporal reference. Results show that the polarity constraint is operative in Laurentian French for both variables, but inoperative in Acadian French. To account for this difference, I argue that Laurentian French negative structures involve a negative head above the tense phrase while Acadian French does not.

Vestiges from the grammaticalization path: The expression of future temporal reference in Acadian French

ABSTRACTThis study presents a variationist analysis of the expression of future temporal reference (variation between the inflected future and the periphrastic future) in a linguistically conservative variety of Acadian French spoken in Baie Sainte-Marie, Nova Scotia, Canada. Results show that Acadian French is distinct from Laurentian French and that the Baie Sainte-Marie variety also differs from other Acadian varieties in some respects. A comparison of the distribution of variants and of the conditioning factors reveals that Acadian and Laurentian varieties have different future temporal reference systems. The Baie Sainte-Marie variety retains vestiges of earlier stages of the grammaticalization of one of the variants, the periphrastic future, not found in other Acadian varieties, thus supporting its characterization as a conservative variety.