The sociolinguistic situation of ‘contemporary dialects of French’ in France today: an overview of recent contributions on the dialectalisation of Standard French

TLDR

The article synthesises recent research on the sociolinguistic situation of contemporary French dialects in France, focusing on regional variation across urban and rural areas. It reviews methodological and conceptual challenges in defining and evaluating dialects, clarifies distinctions among dialects, uses, and speakers, and contrasts northern and southern sociolinguistic contexts. The synthesis reveals greater linguistic variation in contemporary France than traditionally acknowledged, offering nuanced insights that challenge the prevailing monolingual narrative.

Abstract

This article presents a synthesis of the sociolinguistic situation of what the authors refer to as the ‘contemporary dialects’ of French in the France of today. The introduction emphasises the methodological and conceptual problems attending any such definition and evaluation, attempting to clarify the complex situation and to identify the various kinds of ‘dialects’, ‘uses’ and ‘speakers’. We then concentrate on the regional ‘dialects’ of French in continental France, urban and rural, and summarise a series of important recent studies, concentrating on local variation. We also distinguish the sociolinguistic situations of the northern and the southern parts of the country. Even though France is known to be a highly centralised country, whose linguistic policy has been aiming at monolingualism for the past two centuries, the article offers some possibly surprising and nuanced results that show more variation than established opinion would generally admit about contemporary France.