In this study, we investigate first-person-singular subject expression in Louisiana French. This variety is undergoing language death and features extreme variation, with twelve first-person-singular subject forms identified within our corpus. We demonstrate that variationist methods are robust for examining such variation in obsolescing languages, and we provide a model for undertaking such analyses. Examining different aspects of our data, we fit two mixed-effects models, one that analyzes the four most frequent phonological variants of the atonic pronoun je ‘I’ and the other that focuses on the tonic pronoun mon ‘me.’ Several linguistic and social factors predict the use of these subject forms, supporting the claim that variability in declining languages is systematic, just as variation in healthy languages is. We argue that variationist methodologies have contributions to make to research on obsolescing languages and that variationist examinations of endangered and minority languages can provide methodological and theoretical contributions to the study of language variation and change more broadly.

This article outlines the differences in goals, methods and results that variationist researchers may encounter when exploring and/or documenting a threatened language variety, and underscores special considerations and aspects of the research program that linguists must work to control for when working with endangered varieties of Western languages. In particular, it examines questions and strategies for dealing with sparse data for longitudinal studies; fewer speakers for stratified samples; the inverse relation between linguistic fluency and age; social network constraints in small speech communities; literacy-centric exercises in oral language communities; and larger project protocols designed for stable linguistic communities. Throughout the paper, the collection and analysis of Louisiana French liaison data from 1939, 1977, and 2010 provide an application of the proposed methods.