27. The metropolization of French worldwide

Abstract

In the increasingly multicultural and multilingual environments of global cities and metropolises, vernacular varieties of standard languages often emerge as distinct sociolinguistic objects. This reality is strongly influenced by the ecological conditions in which languages are spoken, particularly language contact phenomena. The French language is no exception: its presence in very distinctive urban settings - with specific historical, economic or political features - means it takes on multiple guises. In this chapter, the situation of French in several European, African and North American cities is compared, and the main ecological factors which condition the status and shape of French in these specific environments are identified. The “newness” of the varieties of French and the so-called “youth languages” which develop in these contexts is also discussed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 38 citations exist upstream.