An English "Like No Other"?:
Language Contact and Change in Quebec
Principal Investigator:
Shana Poplack
Co-Investigator: James A. Walker
Research Grant #410-2002-0941 [2002-2005]
The unparalleled success of Quebec‘s
language laws has fundamentally altered the relationship of English
and French in the province. The received wisdom is that English,
in its minority-language guise, has undergone language change induced
by contact with French. But this inference has never been supported
empirically.
Our objective in this research
is to scientifically test the claim that Quebec English is undergoing
change as a result of contact with French. In contrast with previous
work, our focus will be on the spoken language, specifically on
the variable tense/aspect structures contained therein. Our approach
is three-pronged. We will investigate the inference of change over
(apparent) time by comparing the speech of "extant" anglophones (here
defined as those who acquired their vernacular prior to the “Quiet
Revolution” of the 1960s and remained in situ) with that of
younger generations. Contact-induced change, if it has occurred,
should be most evident among those who acquired English after the
passage of Bill 101 (1977) and ensuing language laws. Second, to
rule out the possibility that (eventual) distinctions between the
English of extant and younger anglophones are simply the result of
independent internal evolution, we supplement the temporal comparison
with a sociodemographic component. We compare the English spoken
in three urban centres in which the proportion of English mother-tongue
claimants varies widely: Quebec City, Montreal and, as a control,
Oshawa. If hospitality to contact-induced change is a function of
minority status, as many claim, its effects should be most apparent
in Quebec City, where native anglophones have constituted a minority
at both the provincial and local levels since at least 1850. Finally,
making use of the variationist framework for sociolinguistic analysis
and the comparative methods we have pioneered and successfully applied
to other areas of bilingualism and language contact, we will adduce
the existence and directionality of change by comparing linguistic
structure first, among the contact varieties, and then with that
of the putative source, French. The linguistic focus will be on
English grammatical structures with apparent counterparts in French,
as instantiated in the variable expression of present, past, and
future temporal reference. Such structures are said to be prime
candidates for transfer.
Results will contribute not only
to elucidating the mechanisms of contact-induced change in a variety
of sociodemographic situations, but also, more generally, to characterizing
Canadian English, a national variety which has been lamented as
highly “underdescribed.”
|