Book notice: Acadian French

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Acadian French
Series Title: Languages of the World/Materials 101
Published: 2006
Publisher: Lincom GmbH
                http://www.lincom.at

Author: VIRGINIA MOTAPANYANE, University of New Brunswick

Acadian French

Virginia Motapanyane (with the collaboration of David Jory)
University of New Brunswick

Acadian is a French dialect spoken in the Atlantic province of Canada, by
approximately 250,000 speakers. Although French is an official language in
Canada, and the linguistic rights of the Acadians have constitutional
protection, the dialect presents the signs of an endangered language. The
denomination 'Acadian French' covers an impressive number of regional
varieties, or 'parlers', whose geographical distribution is often
described in terms of 'islands', to indicate the immersion of many Acadian
communities within English speaking areas. This sketch offeres a survey of
the most general properties of Acadian French: (i) in phonology, the
description focuses on phenomena such as palatalization of /k/, /g/ before
all front vowels; ouisms; strong /r/; (ii) morpho-syntactic pecularities
such as the pronominal paradigms, generalization of auxiliary avoir in
present past, frequent occurrence of 'passe simple' will be presented in
two chapters. It will be shown that some of these properties attest
grammatical forms in Old French, others result from local innovations, and
from language contact. A special chapter discusses the contribution of
extra-linguistic factors to the decline of this dialect, as well as
possible means for preventing its extinction.

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