French in Ontario

Abstract

Abstract While French is a minority language in the Canadian province of Ontario, it has majority status in a small number of localities, including the northeastern town of Hearst. Using an excerpt from the PFC Hearst corpus, featuring a female speaker in her twenties in informal conversation with a friend describing her leisure activities, this chapter describes and illustrates the characteristics of Laurentian French. Language elements presented include lexicon (regional words and English borrowings), morpho-syntax (e.g. auxiliary verbs avoir and être, ne deletion), discourse markers (e.g. pis, là, fait que, ben), vowels (including processes such as high vowel laxing and variable realization of schwa), and consonants (including affrication to /t/ and /d/, and liaison realization). It is shown that, in this majority setting in Ontario, spoken French differs little from that of the neighbouring province of Quebec where French is the dominant language.

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