4:00 p.m.
Humanities Bldg. 118
(1)
destruct-er d'- aut monde
'We know more ways to, like, destroy other people.'
Assuming then that we are dealing not with code-switching but with a
distinct variety, we could take the position that lexical items of
English origin are loanwords in Chiac. How then do we account for the
occurrence in Chiac of English-based core vocabulary, such as
good, blood and laugh, which is supposed to be
highly resistant to borrowing? The answer lies in part in the
continued bilingualism of speakers.
This paper presents a sociolinguistic analysis of Chiac, including a
discussion of potential problems such as this. I begin by providing a brief
grammatical sketch of the phenomenon known as Chiac. Then I consider
potential ways of describing and classifying it from a sociolinguistic
perspective. I conclude that Chiac is a variety of AF whose inventory of
symbolic units includes many constructions of English origin, especially
lexical constructions.
Abstract
Chiac is the name given to the speech of certain Acadian French(AF)-English
bilinguals in Moncton, Canada. It presents an interesting challenge for
sociolinguistic analysis in that it makes use of units from AF and English
in ways that can suggest code-switching or a distinct conventional system:
either a dialect of AF or a mixed language. As such, it is not easily
classified using traditional categories such as code-switching, mixed
language, etc. For instance, the example below (from my corpus of spoken
Chiac) is not typical of code-switching since the switch between the
English-origin root destruct and the French suffix -er occurs before a
bound morpheme. This is difficult to account for in a code-switching
framework since it is not clear what the motivation for such a switch could
be.
on sait plus de manihre-s à comme like
3s know.3s.PRES more of way-pl to like like
destroy-INF DET other people