The representation of spoken French in Quebec theater

Marie-Odile Fonollosa

Sat. 2:00-3:40 C

Over the past 25 years or so, there have been several studies on spoken French in Montreal based on the Sankoff-Cedergren (1971) and Montreal '84 corpora. These data consist of informal speech recorded among the various social classes of Francophone Montrealers. At the same time, through their characters, Quebec playwrights have been representing local speech; especially Michel Tremblay who clearly claims it is his intent to create characters speaking the way people talk in "real life".

However, given the low degree of consciousness with regard to linguistic variation, one can ask to what extent a playwright can truly reproduce, in a play's dialogue, the real variety of the spoken language. This is exactly what we will attempt to demonstrate through the analyses of three variables in a sub-corpus of ten Sankoff-Cedergren and Montreal '84 speakers interviewed in 1971 and 1984, as well as in a grouping of ten Tremblay plays written during the same period.

The selected variables are: the locative adverb ici 'here' which has a local variant pronounced "icitte"; the alternation between je vais, je vas 'I go' and m'as (from je m'en vas; literally 'I'm going there') and the tout/toute 'all', alternation studied by Lemieux, Saint-Amour and Sankoff (1985). Preliminary results show among other things, that the more stigmatized forms are over-represented in the plays while the less stigmatized ones pretty well match real use by local speakers.

References

Lemieux, Monique, Marielle Saint-Amour, et David Sankoff. (1985). /TUT/ en français de Montréal: un cas de neutralisation morphologique. In Lemieux, M. &Cedergren H. J. (eds) Les tendances dynamiques du francais parle a Montreal. Tome 2 . Quebec: Gouvernement du Quebec, Office de la langue francaise, pp. 7-89.

H. Cedergren et M. Lemieux (eds.). Les tendances dynamiques du français parlé à Montréal, Tome 1. Montréal: Office de la langue française, 7-91.