Stop Assibilation of Quebec French

1. Introduction

This paper is investigating Quebec French. The population that speaks this variety of French situates on the eastern side of the country of Canada in the province of Quebec (Posner 1997, Walker 1984). The people who immigrated to Quebec originated from west and north-west regions of France, the dialects spoken there are commonly called langue d’oïl (Ager 1990, Sanders 1993, Battye and Hintz 1994). However, in the region of langue d’oïl there was a lot of variation in the speech spoken (Battye and Hintz 1994). The regions in the west and north-west are Gallo, Angevin and Normand, most immigrants originated from there (Battye and Hintz 1994). The language that these immigrants spoke was a lower-class speech or non-standard dialect (Oakes and Warren 2007). The men were mainly from Normandy and the women, who came over at a latter point in time, were mainly from partisan brothels and orphanages (Posner 1997). Therefore, both men and women had different dialects and different uses of speech. Around the 17th century, during the time of colonization, there were approximately 16, 000 speakers of French in Quebec (Posner 1997).

The state of the French language at this time in Europe before and during when these immigrants came over to North America is the next focus. In the 17th century, the royal court started to implement standardization and slowly the language evolution in France slowed (Battye and Hintz 1994, Posner 1997, Fagyal et al. 2006). Although this process was slow, showing more evidence in areas closer to royal court. In the 18th century, popular French in France had the omission of the negative /ne/, and /we/ was the common diphthong then the /wa/ in the royal court, there was an absence of the interrogativ...

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