An in depth examination of linguistic variation and change as a reflection of social convergence in the major French-speaking countries of Europe - France, Belgium and Switzerland. Considered in the context of linguistic levelling the book provides a detailed account of recent social and linguistic change in European French.

Rebecca Posner explores the history of the French language in all its manifestations. Within the framework of modern linguistic theory, she concentrates on how French acquired its distinctive identity and how different varieties of French relate to each other. This book richly illustrates the more technical aspects of linguistic change, and sets evidence of social history against the way the language has changed over time.

This volume provides a systematic comparative treatment of urban contact dialects in the Global North and South, examining the emergence and development of these dialects in major cities in sub-Saharan Africa and North-Western Europe. The book’s focus on contemporary urban settings sheds light on the new language practices and mixed ways of speaking resulting from large-scale migration and the intense contact that occurs between new and existing languages and dialects in these contexts. In comparing these new patterns of language variation and change between cities in both Africa and Europe, the volume affords us a unique opportunity to examine commonalities in linguistic phenomena as well as sociolinguistic differences in societally multilingual settings and settings dominated by a strong monolingual habitus. These comparisons are reinforced by a consistent chapter structure, with each chapter presenting the linguistic and social context of the region, information on available data (including corpora), sociolinguistic and structural findings, a discussion of the status of the urban contact dialect, and its stability over time. The discussion in the book is further enriched by short commentaries from researchers contributing different theoretical and geographical perspectives. Taken as a whole, the book offers new insights into migration-based linguistic diversity and patterns of language variation and change, making this ideal reading for students and scholars in general linguistics and language structure, sociolinguistics, creole studies, diachronic linguistics, language acquisition, anthropological linguistics, language education and discourse analysis.

The coming together of linguistics and sociology in the 1960's, most notably via the work of William Labov, marked a revolution in the study of language and provided a paradigm for the understanding of variation and change. Labovian quantitative methods have been employed successfully in North America, the UK, Scandinavia and New Zealand, but have had surprisingly little resonance in France, a country which poses many challenges to orthodox sociolinguistic thinking. Why, for example, does a nation with unexceptional scores on income distribution and social mobility show an exceptionally high degree of linguistic levelling, that is, the elimination of marked regional or local speech forms? And why does French appear to abound in 'hyperstyle' variables, which show greater variation on the stylistic than on the social dimension, in defiance of a well-established theory than such variables should not occur? This volume brings together leading variationist sociolinguists and sociologists from both sides of the Channel to ask: what makes France'exceptional'? In addressing this question, variationists have been forced to reassess the accepted interdisciplinary consensus, and to ask, as sociolinguistics has come of age, whether concepts and definitions have been transposed in a way which meaningfully preserves their original sense and, crucially, takes account of recent developments in sociology. Sociologists, for their part, have focused on the largely neglected area of language variation and its implications for social theory. Their findings therefore transcend the case study of a particularly enigmatic country to raise important theoretical questions for both disciplines.

Collective nouns such asmajorite or foulehave long been of interest to linguists for their unusual semantic properties, and provide a valuable source of new data on the evolution of French grammar. This book tests the hypothesis that plural agreement with collective nouns is becoming more frequent in French. Through an analysis of data from a variety of sources, including sociolinguistic interviews, gap-fill tests and corpora, the complex linguistic and external factors which affect this type of agreement are examined, shedding new light on their interaction in this context. Broader questions concerning the methodological challenges of studying variation and change in morphosyntax, and the application of sociolinguistic generalisations to the French of France, are also addressed.

This book considers how far social factors explain why human societies produce different kinds of language at different times and places and why some languages and dialects get simpler while others get more complex. It does so in the context of a wide range of languages and societies.

Bringing together a team of renowned international scholars, this volume provides a wide-ranging collection of historical and state-of-the-art perspectives on language regard, particularly in the context of language variation and language change, and importantly, highlights the range of new methodologies being used by linguists to explore and evaluate it. The importance of language regard to the inquiry of language variation and change in the field of sociolinguistics is increasingly being recognized, yet misunderstandings about its nature and importance continue to exist. This volume provides scholars and students of sociolinguistics, with the tools and theory to pursue such inquiry. Contributions and research come from Europe, North America, and Asia, and language varieties such as Spanish, Dutch, Danish, and American Sign Language are discussed.