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Liaison and Geography

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Norm and Ideology in Spoken French

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Abstract

This exploration of geographical variability in liaison begins (Sect. 5.1) by establishing a ‘hard core’ of non-variable liaisons used across the francophone world: this proves rather narrower than Delattre’s inventory of liaisons obligatoires as presented in Chap. 2. A review of findings for francophone Europe (Sect. 5.2) offers little hard evidence of diatopic variability, but elsewhere in the francophone world (Sect. 5.3) non-standard liaison use is evident in normatively independent North America, but a European norm prevails in parts of Africa where a colonial education system is established. Here in particular liaison usage is again strongly linked to literacy in French.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    A different division (Europe, Canada, Africa) is proposed by Durand et al. (2011) while Laks and Calderone (2014) distinguish France, first-language French areas (Belgium, Switzerland, Canada) and a second-language francophone zone (Africa).

  2. 2.

    Barreca’s figure includes en as a variable liaison site; Côté treats en as non-variable but includes it for comparison with Barreca’s data.

  3. 3.

    Defined by Sankoff and Laberge (1978: 239) as:

    an index which measures specifically how speakers ‘economic activity, taken in its widest sense, requires or is necessarily associated with, competence in the legitimized language (or standard, elite, educated, etc. language)’

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  1. School of European Culture and Languages, University of Kent School of European Culture and Languages, Canterbury, Kent, UK

    David Hornsby

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Hornsby, D. (2020). Liaison and Geography. In: Norm and Ideology in Spoken French. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49300-4_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49300-4_5

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