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16 - French and English in Contact in North America

from Part Four - Emergence and Spread of Some European Languages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2022

By
Robert A. Papen
Edited by
Salikoko S. Mufwene  and
Anna María Escobar
Salikoko S. Mufwene
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
Anna María Escobar
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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Summary

This chapter generally deals with the borrowing of lexical items from English into varieties of North American oral French. First, the socio-historic context of English–French language contact in North America from the late eighteenth century to the present is described. Current demographics on French spoken at home in North America are then provided. An extensive review of the quantitative research on lexical borrowing in oral French in North America follows: the Eastern Townships of Quebec, the Ottawa-Gatineau region, on the border of Quebec and Ontario, Nova Scotia, the case of Chiac in New Brunswick, the community of Hearst in northern Ontario, French in Massachusetts and in Louisiana. In conclusion, the article attempts to compare a number of borrowing features in the communities studied, such as rate of lexical borrowing, grammatical category preference in borrowing, degree of morphological, syntactic and phonological integration, etc.

Keywords

socio-historic context of English–French language contact in North AmericaNorth American oral Frenchlexical borrowingFrench language demographics in North Americaquantitative research on lexical borrowingexternal factors in lexical borrowingcomparable features in lexical borrowing in North American French
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact
Volume 1: Population Movement and Language Change
 , pp. 505 - 539
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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