Prairie French Project
This
project involves the collection, transcription and analysis of French
interviews with native Albertan and Manitoban French speakers,
including a number of Metis French speakers.I am working on
analyzing aspects of Michif French as spoken in
Saint Laurent, Manitoba, in comparison with other Laurentian French
varieties.
This research has been funded by the Centre de Recherche du Français Minoritaire (CRFM) at the Institut Français at the University of Regina.
So far we have principally been investigating phonetic features of the Métis and non-Métis speakers of Prairies French, specifically back vowels and overall vowel space of the varieties.
We have published one paper so far on the back vowels:
- Une comparaison des voyelles postérieures du français mitchif et
du français franco-manitobain. (2016) in Papen, Robert &
Sandrine Hallion Bres, eds. À l'ouest des Grands Lacs: communautés
francophones et variétés de français dans les Prairies et en
Colombie-Britannique. Presses de l’Université Laval. pp109-154.
I am also currently working on analyzing rhythmic differences in a joint project with Christian Guilbault at Simon Fraser University. We will present findings in our talk Caractéristiques rythmiques du français mitchif : observations préliminaires, at Les français d'ici in Moncton, New Brunswick in June.
I have also teamed up with Daniel Bérubé at Université St Boniface
and we are investigating VOT of Franco-Manitoban bilingual adults and
children.
The transcription of these interviews into ELAN will permit study of
other variables in the future, and I hope to work with more speakers in
Saint Laurent in the near future.