Social and Stylistic Variation in Spoken French: A Comparative Approach (review)

‘Standard’ French has not been as widely studied using Labovian variationist methods as have other languages and language varieties. The author, who makes this observation, thus sets out to analyze sociolinguistic variation at the phonological, grammatical, and lexical levels in a corpus of contemporary spoken French working within a Labovian ‘variationist’ framework.

A revised 1993 PhD dissertation for the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, this book contains seven chapters, four of which have already appeared as published journal articles or chapters in other volumes—Ch. 2, ‘Patterns of phonological variation’; Ch. 3, ‘Socio-stylistic variation in French phonology’; Ch. 4, ‘Grammatical variation’; and Ch. 6, ‘Variation in the French lexicon’. Of the remaining three, Ch. 1 is an ‘Introduction’, Ch. 7 is ‘The conclusion’, and Ch. 5 is a study on ‘Variable liaison’. A subject index, list of references, and an appendix of nonstandard lexical items glossed in English and discussed in Ch. 6 complete the volume.

One of the author’s first considerations is to make clear that the variety of French he is examining is the urban nonsouthern French of France, commonly referred to as ‘standard French’. But as ‘standard French’ is not a monolithic language variety (it includes a wide range of speech styles and subvarieties), Armstrong prefers to avoid using the term here and to use instead either langue d’oïl (oïl French, for short), the diachronic term, or ‘leveled’ French. Dialect leveling refers to the diminution of linguistic differences between language varieties whereas standardization refers to the process of suppression of linguistic variation in response to institutional ‘top-down’ initiatives (4). The author returns to this subject, of considerable interest in the UK, elsewhere in the book.

Chs. 2 and 3 are both devoted to variation at the phonological level. The former presents an account of the theoretical issues related to the sociostylistic functions of phonological variation (such as the deletion of schwa or vowel nasalization) and discusses the results of a recent evaluative survey of French social-regional pronunciation based on fieldwork which the author conducted in Nancy and Rennes in 1997–98. The latter presents some behavioral language data (the Dieuze corpus, recorded in northeastern France in 1990, and the Paris corpus, recorded in 2000) and analyzes some patterns of phonological variation (11). A found few pronunciation features in oïl French that show regional localization.

Some examples of variable grammar, such as the negative particle ne in French and the use of nonstandard concord in English, are considered in Ch. 4. A suggests that French grammatical variables may be unusual in having a rather wide social distribution in contrast to the polarized pattern seen in some English variables whose distribution has been quantified (237). The conclusion reached is that in French, variable grammar functions in a ‘quantitative’ way that recalls the phonological level in other languages.

Variable liaison does not constitute a linguistic level of analysis like phonology or syntax. A justifies giving it a separate chapter because of its unusual character and its idiosyncratic nature: It receives input from several linguistic levels—phonology, syntax, and morphology; it consists of greater variability in standard rather than nonstandard varieties; and it is a linguistic resource which is highly dependent on literacy and hence not available to an entire speech community. Most of the information presented in Ch. 5 is not new (the author acknowledges his debt to many who preceded him in this area of analysis, especially P. Encrevé (La liaison avec et sans enchainement, Paris: Seuil, 1988)).

French possesses a substantial set of lexical alternates having different socio-stylistic value (e.g. cigarette, standard ~ clope, colloquial). A is able to exploit this fact and apply Labovian analysis to lexis. This analysis, the object of investigation of Ch. 6, shows that full lexical words are recalcitrant to a Labovian, quantitative analysis (241).

In Ch. 7, the author acknowledges some of the study’s limitations and offers suggestions for...