Katie Carmichael

In the French-speaking communities of Terrebonne and Lafourche Parishes in Louisiana, the phoneme /ʒ/ has an allophonic variant /h/ such that, for example, the word jamais ‘never’ may be pronounced variably /3ame/ or /hame/. In the French of the Pointe-Au-Chien Indian Tribe (henceforth PACF), use of the variant /h/ has been shown to pattern with age, proficiency, and sex of the speaker (Carmichael 2008). As this community shifts to English, the younger generation gets less exposure to PACF, resulting in marked differences between their speech and that of older, more conservative PACF speakers.
These differences are distinct from normal processes of language change and representative instead of those resulting from language shift. Such processes include increased variability, simplification, convergence (with English, in this case), and reduction of marked forms (Wolfram 2002). A combination of these factors may account for the emergence of the null subject construction and the reduction of /h/-substitution in the French of the younger generation of speakers and semi-speakers. This paper examines the relationship between these two features in PACF.
          Use of null subject constructions and reduction of /h/-substitution are two features that pattern by age and proficiency in PACF, suggesting that they are the product of language shift. Indeed, both features have been argued to reflect register reduction in the French of the younger generation of speakers and semi-speakers (Rottet 2005; Carmichael 2008).
However, they also pattern with gender, suggesting that there may still be social meaning attached to the variants, even for younger speakers. Additionally, the variant /h/ has been shown to appear more often in the first person singular pronoun je than in other lexical items, due to frequency of utterance (Boissonneault 1999). Thus one may conclude a causal relationship; if one of the most frequent environments for /h/-substitution is frequently omitted, reduction of this feature may be expected. This paper will investigate these factors in order to better understand the relationship between null-subject constructions and reduction of /h/-substitution in PACF.

Works Cited

          Boissonneault, Chantal. 1999. Le Français de l’Abitibi: Caractéristiques Phonétiques Et Origine Socio-Géographique des Locuteurs. Masters Thesis, Université Laval.

          Carmichael, Katie. 2008. Language Death and Stylistic Variation: An Intergenerational Study of the Substitution of /h/ for /ʒ/ in the French of thePointe-Au-Chien Indians. Masters Thesis, Tulane University.
Rottet, Kevin J. Variation et Etiolement en Francais Cadien: Perspectives Comparées. pp. 243-260 in Valdman, Albert ; Auger, Julie ; and Piston-Hatlen, Deborah (ed.). Le Français en Amérique du Nord : Etat Présent. Les Presses de l’Université Laval: Saint-Nicolas, Québec, Canada. 2005.

           Wolfram, Walt. 2002. Language death and dying. Pp. 764-787 in The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, ed. by J. K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill and Natalie Schilling-Estes. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.