FR4207 - Language and Society

Types of Variation:

• Interspeaker - difference between individuals
• Intraspeaker - 'within' individuals - language allows us to sound different from moment to moment.

Interspeaker: 

• Geographical factors in variation
• More than one 'français' - standard, normalisé French exists alongside numerous 'français régionaux'
• Regional French 
• Regional French does not refer to separate languages, eg Breton.
• Certain regional varieties are better perceived than others, eg Parisien is very well viewed
• There is much more contact between languages these days (modern media), which may cause dialect leveling - when the characteristics of regional French disappear (Armstrong)
• nivellement linguistique
• Social factors in variation (sociobiographical) – Age
• Generational differences - the young assume innovative characteristics that set them apart from their elders T
• La langue des jeunes - use of language to express youthful identity
• This leads to language change - there is an inflow of non prestige forms until the prestige forms die out - young people institute language change
• Gender and variation  
• Gender vs sex - biological differences, eg voice differences = sex
• Socially conditioned differences = gender 
• Social Class
• Hard to define - based on concepts social mobility, education, residence, social network 
• no longer defined just by what job you have, people no longer occupy just one job for life
• no longer defined just by area - people move around much more as well
• no longer defined just by social network - these days we have a much broader social network 
• Indexing - based on various factors - people placed within middle or lower class based on their score on the index 

Intraspeaker:

•  Stylistic factors - no speaker is 'mono-stylistic' - uses one style all the time
• Their style varies depending on
•  interlocutor (audience/speaking partner), topic and place 
• mode - written vs spoken/media/type of discourse (conversation, interview, lecture)
• Standard French - so many existing varieties, what is standard?
• can the standard be based on geography? Eg Parisien French is more standard than southern French?
• can the standard be based on age? Why is youth language 'less prestigious'?
• Language register 
• français cultivé/soutenu (formal, hyper correct French) 
• français courant/commun (less standard but not incorrect, features ne deletion, l deletion)
• français familier (contains incorrect French)
• français vulgaire (sometimes offensive) 
• It would be hard to decide a universal norm because there is no reason to give greater value to one variety of French over another 
• eg metropolitan French vs Belgian or Quebecois French
• Plurilinguistic approach - different French speaking societies can have different standards 
• If the varieties of French are not recognised as standard then the 'français régionaux' are assigned a negative quality

Language Attitudes: Variation vs Standardisation

•  There are various bodies devoted to the 'identification du bon usage' of French 
• Academie Française (metropolitan) 
• L'office de la langue française (Quebec)
• There are also various laws intended to regulate the use of French
• Loi Toubon '93 -  French must be used in all official public/government and commercial documents/contexts (advertising, interviews)
• Loi Bas-Lauriol '71 - targeting anglicisms - banning foreign terms or expressions in public documents

Prescription vs Description 

• Linguists attempt to describe linguistic norms of usage rather than prescribing (dictate) them
• They do not attempt to suppress language variation - variation is natural and normal for a language 

FR4207 - Key Concepts - Homogeneity vs Variation

The French language:

• Some linguists claim it is varied - there are differences within the language in how it's used
• Others describe it as singular or uniform, i.e. there is only one French language, which exists as a homogeneous entity. French doesn't differ that much within the French speaking world
• Homogeneity = a characteristic of language. Examples of homogeneity:
• "Je suis en train de lire le roman." - every French speaker would recognise this and understand it as correct
• "Lire suis je en train de roman le" - no French speaker would produce this
• There are totally incorrect things (wrong gender or number for article, or wrong verb ending for a pronoun) which no French speaker in any part of the world would ever say and this gives French its homogeneity 
• Therefore it's clear that homogeneity is structural (to do with grammar). We must ask ourselves what is the same about all French speakers?
• they have the same internal representation/underlying linguistic system of rules/ linguistic competence (universal grammar) which stable/unchanging/fixed/rigid
• competence is the internal representation of the language and it is unvaried over time once learned 
• The Noam Chomsky school of thought (generative linguistics) is based around the idea of knowledge in our heads which allows us to generate correct utterances and has no interest in linguistic performance

Linguistic Variation: 

• Heterogeneity in language = the opposite of homogeneity
• Variationist linguists view language as highly creative, with a lot of linguistic choice
•  Linguistic Performance is the counterpart of competence - how we use language (what we say vs what we know) 
• Labov = a pioneer of the variationist approach (the opposite of generativist 
• Examples of lexical variation 
• voiture vs bagnole (register)
• bourgestre vs maire (Belgium vs metropole)
• le souper vs le dîner (Quebec vs metropole)
• Examples of phonetic variation
• les gens(.) arrivent vs les gens_arrivent (the choice of making the liaison or not)
•  il y a vs y a (/l/ deletion)
•  Examples of morphological variation
• ne deletion - je comprends pas vs je ne comprend pas
• future - je vais sortir vs je sors demain vs je sortirai
• Language choice goes together with language change
• Examples of syntactic change 
• questions - avez-vous fini? vs vous avez fini?
• passive vs active voice
• Examples of Discursive/pragmatic variation
• donc vs par conséquent - filler words
• register
• Variation and Homogeneity coexist in language - how can linguistics reconcile this
• search for systematicity - a system within language
• investigate language change - how the system changes 
• search for a linguistic norm, if that exists - is there a standard, correct way of speaking French?
• description vs prescription - linguists don't prescribe the correct way of using a language, they just describe the norms and standards