Implicit Norms and 'School French' Forms: Linguistic Cohesion of Second-Generation Francophones in Victoria, BC

Abstract

Within the francophone community of Victoria, British Columbia, first-generation (G1) speakers provide conflicting usage models (Laurentian French and Hexagonal French) to second-generation (G2) speakers. In addition, speaker interactions are greatly restricted due to severe community-level instability – a situation that seems likely to prevent G2 speakers from converging on cohesive speech norms. However, long-term observation has uncovered the community-wide impression that G2 speakers do share norms, but that their speech differs from both donor varieties. Instead, G2 speech is thought to reflect a major influence from the context in which they primarily use French – the francophone school – and is thus impressionistically judged to have a rather ‘standard’ quality. The central aims of this study are to 1) determine whether G2 speakers do, in fact, share cohesive usage norms, and 2) substantiate the belief that G2 French has been shaped by explicit instruction in prescriptive grammar (‘school’ French). I achieve these aims using the quantitative, empirical methods of COMPARATIVE VARIATIONIST ANALYSIS (Poplack and Tagliamonte 2001), an approach couched in VARIATION THEORY (Labov 1966, 1972, 1984). Using a newly constructed corpus of naturalistic G1 and G2 speech, I compare speakers’ patterns for four linguistic variables (assibilation, avoir/être, future temporal reference, and yes/no questions) – each of which is diagnostic of differences between each of the donor varieties and the rules of school French – to the patterns attested in noncontact benchmark data. Results for each of the variables independently show that G2 speakers are cohesive in their treatment of three variables (assibilation, avoir/être, and future temporal reference), and are approaching cohesion in the fourth (yes/no questions), thus substantiating the hypothesis of G2 linguistic cohesion. For all variables except yes/no questions, G2 speakers are unidirectionally oriented towards LF patterns, but for yes/no questions they instead adopt more of a common target approach, which supplants the different ‘default’ interrogatives provided by the donor usage norms with est-ce que. As for whether G2 speech has been influenced by explicit instruction in school French, the findings do not entirely bear this out. Although results indicate a superficial alignment with prescriptive injunction for both avoir/être and yes/no questions, this is not confined to G2 speakers alone: G1 speakers also use far more of the saliently privileged variants than would be expected from benchmark usage data. This suggests that the presence of these features at G2 cannot be exclusively due to their exposure to prescriptive instruction. Supporting this conclusion is the fact that the rate of ‘standard’ variants does not consistently fluctuate according to degree of exposure to standard French. These results have implications for the idea that restriction in contexts of usage is necessarily correlated with restriction in functional capacity as well (cf. Mougeon and Beniak 1991). Where it was possible to assess underlying conditioning, Victoria G2 speakers demonstrated full alignment with benchmark Laurentian usage norms – demonstrating that they are not functionally restricted. This study also has implications for our understanding of how dialect contact might proceed in extreme minority situations. Despite acquiring language in a relatively ‘unsettled’ linguistic context, there was no evidence to suggest that G2 speakers are subject to the processes associated with new-dialect formation or koineisation – with the possible exception of sociostylistic reallocation within the yes/no question system, which is not an outcome that is exclusive to situations of dialect contact. In other words, there is nothing to suggest that French in Victoria behaves all that differently from French in other communities, thereby disconfirming impressionistic assessments of G2 linguistic peculiarity.