Southern Regional French: A Linguistic Analysis of Language and Dialect Contact by Damien Mooney (review)

Regional varieties of French in France have not received the close attention they deserve, and variationist sociolinguistics, the approach that would seem to offer the greatest potential rewards, has been relatively neglected. Mooney's book attempts to bridge this gap by tackling the linguistic situation in Béarn, where the local language is still spoken, together with a form of regional French (RF). A cursory introduction to the regional speech community and an overview of the phonologies of Béarnais and the local RF set the stage well, though a few details in these chapters might need to be qualified or corrected. The first of the book's major contributions is a pioneering attempt to discover "the exact mechanisms" (3) by which linguistic residue from a local language (Béarnais, in this case) may be preserved in RF, a problem that has nearly always been treated in very superficial ways. Mooney's results in this respect are interesting but inconclusive. His second contribution is a study of the RF of Béarn over (apparent) time, and his conclusions on this account seem both convincing and illuminating. The basic question he asks is whether the RF of Béarn is an ephemeral phenomenon destined to melt into the supralocal vernacular language that dominates across most of France. His data suggest that movement toward the broader model is not leading ineluctably to convergence and that younger speakers mix local and supralocal features with innovative variants, thus allowing them to "negotiate conflicting regional and non-local identities by sounding like southerners, but modern southerners" (110). Whether this can be connected, as Mooney suggests, with a postmodern rejection of Jacobinism (118) and "an alternative future for modern France" (122) cannot be answered by the data he provides, of course. A few points in the study might have benefited from additional clarification. Mooney's treatment of the front unrounded mid vowels in the RF of Bearn is slightly puzzling. He is less than clear about the /e/~/ε/ contrast (37, 48), suggesting, based on studies by Moreux, that in word-final open syllables the contrast was meaningful in a generation older than those he is studying but not in younger speakers. Thus, when the language contact chapter focuses on the comparative acoustic profiles of /e/ and /ε/, he may actually mean the allophones [e] and [ε]. In addition, it might be easy to miss the author's warning (52) that even his "older speakers," nearly all born since 1940, learned to speak French in early childhood. This means that RF is not an L2 for them, but a second L1, almost certainly acquired before they went to school. Mooney's book is situated in the field of sociophonetics and will be rather rough going for those not familiar with variationist methodology, acoustic phonetics, and the use of statistics within sociolinguistics.