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