Description
The coming together of linguistics and sociology in the 1960's, most notably via the work of William Labov, marked a revolution in the study of language and provided a paradigm for the understanding of variation and change. Labovian quantitative methods have been employed successfully in North America, the UK, Scandinavia and New Zealand, but have had surprisingly little resonance in France, a country which poses many challenges to orthodox sociolinguistic thinking. Why, for example, does a nation with unexceptional scores on income distribution and social mobility show an exceptionally high degree of linguistic levelling, that is, the elimination of marked regional or local speech forms? And why does French appear to abound in 'hyperstyle' variables, which show greater variation on the stylistic than on the social dimension, in defiance of a well-established theory than such variables should not occur? This volume brings together leading variationist sociolinguists and sociologists from both sides of the Channel to ask: what makes France'exceptional'? In addressing this question, variationists have been forced to reassess the accepted interdisciplinary consensus, and to ask, as sociolinguistics has come of age, whether concepts and definitions have been transposed in a way which meaningfully preserves their original sense and, crucially, takes account of recent developments in sociology. Sociologists, for their part, have focused on the largely neglected area of language variation and its implications for social theory. Their findings therefore transcend the case study of a particularly enigmatic country to raise important theoretical questions for both disciplines.
Table of Contents
Introduction Part I: Language and Social Class 1. Instruments de travail and the Travails of Instruments: Reflections on the Cross-national Measurement of Social Class 2. Social Stratification in France: Measures and Trends 3. The Sociological Discourse on Inequality and Social Class in France 4. Class and Culture in Contemporary France 5. On Levelling and Counter-Levelling in French: A Phonological 6. The Social Differentiation of Grammar in France 7. Hyperstyle Variation in French: Yet Another exception culturelle? Part II: Language, Space and Social Ch ange 8. Exception française? Levelling, Exclusion, and Urban Social Structure in France 9. Banlieues as a Social Problem: Changing Discourse on Space, Class and 10. Race in France, 1985–1995 11. Locating Variation in French: Geolinguistic Patterns, Levelling and the ‘French Exception’ 12. Sociolinguistic Change in the City: Gentrification and its Linguistic Correlates in Marseille 13. Space, Language and Minorization: The Urban Character of Gallo (Rennes) 14. Collecting a New Corpus in the Paris Area: Intertwining Methodological and Sociolinguistic Reflections Part III: Renvois 15. Studying Language and Society in France: Contemporary Developments at the Intersection of Sociology and Sociolinguistics 16. Studying Variation in Urban France: The State of Play and Prospects for the Future
