Les variétés régionales non-méridionales de France: nivellement; dédialectalisation; supralocalisation
Tim Pooley, Jonathan Kasstan
direct link: http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/004092
January 2016
For some time now, studies on Hexagonal French have evidenced a particularly extreme kind of linguistic levelling, which has largely been attributed to the hypercephalic nature of French demographics, with an enormous capital city dwarfing all other major centres in France (see Armstrong 2001). This focus on ‘inexorable homogeneisation’ (Jones & Hornsy 2013) has meant that far less attention has been paid to emerging vernacular forms and urban-centred cases of linguistic divergence. In this article we summarise observations from a wide range of production/percetion studies, with a particular focus on non-meridional varieties, to show that while extreme levelling continues to be symptomatic of variation in northern France, certain features are retained or recycled, and in some contexts even imbued with new social meaning. This evidence lends support to the call made elsewhere (Jones & Hornsy 2013) that further research should be undertaken on multi-ethnic urban centres