Michael D. Picone

Catherine Evans Davies

An outgrowth of the LAVIS III symposium (2004), New Perspectives on Language Variety in the South: Historical and Contemporary Approaches comprises forty-five original essays (revised and reviewed) on a range of topics regarding the languages and dialects of the American South.

Historical and Contemporary Approaches

New Perspectives on Language Variety in the South

This comprehensive study of Anglicisms in the context of accelerated neological activity in Contemporary Metropolitan French not only provides detailed documentation and description of a fascinating topic, but opens up new vistas on issues of general linguistic interest: the effects of technology on language, the analyticity-syntheticity controversy, the lexical contribution to language vitality, the study of compound word formation, the interplay between cultural and linguistic affectivity. By investigating the dynamics of borrowing within the larger framework of general neological productivity and by bringing to bear cognitive and pragmatic considerations, a much-needed fresh approach to the entire question of Anglicisms takes shape. All pertinent phenomena regarding Anglicisms in French -- a topic which continues to command the attention of language commentators and defenders in France and elsewhere -- are explored: integral borrowings, semantic calques, structural calques, the generation of pseudo-Anglicisms and hybrids, graphological and phonological phenomena. In each case, the phenomenon is investigated in the proper context of its interaction with other pertinent neological, phonological and sociocultural developments. These include general changes in French compound word formation, modified derivational dynamics, the microsystem of pseudo-Classical morphology, historic phonological instabilities, the pressure for more synthetic types of lexical production in relation to the needs of technology and society. Rather than adhering rigidly to any single theoretical model, there is an attempt to set up a dialog between differing models in order to arrive at a multidimensional view of the phenomena investigated.

Anglicisms, Neologisms and Dynamic French

Barry Jean Ancelet

Albert Valdman

Kevin J. Rottet

Richard Guidry

Thomas A. Klingler

Amanda LaFleur

Tamara Lindner

Dominique Ryon

The Dictionary of Louisiana French (DLF) provides the richest inventory of French vocabulary in Louisiana and reflects precisely the speech of the period from 1930 to the present. This dictionary describes the current usage of French-speaking peoples in the five broad regions of South Louisiana: the coastal marshes, the banks of the Mississippi River, the central area, the north, and the western prairie. Data were collected during interviews from at least five persons in each of twenty-four areas in these regions. In addition to the data collected from fieldwork, the dictionary contains material compiled from existing lexical inventories, from texts published after 1930, and from archival recordings. The new authoritative resource, the DLF not only contains the largest number of words and expressions but also provides the most complete information available for each entry. Entries include the word in the conventional French spelling, the pronunciation (including attested variants), the part of speech classification, the English equivalent, and the word's use in common phrases. The DLF features a wealth of illustrative examples derived from fieldwork and textual sources and identification of the parish where the entry was collected or the source from which it was compiled. An English-to-Louisiana French index enables readers to find out how particular notions would be expressed in la Louisiane.

As Spoken in Cajun, Creole, and American Indian Communities

Dictionary of Louisiana French

Michael D. Picone

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