I’m transcribing some broadcasts from Louisiana in French for a class on language change. For the recents broadcasts, I chose the show La Tasse de café on KVPI, and for the old broadcasts, the series En français, which was broadcast by Louisiana Public Broadcasting, a public TV station, in the 80s and 90s. I’m analyzing the variation between third person plural subject pronouns, meaning ils, ils -ont, ça, eux and eux-autres, but something that I immediately noticed in relation to the speech of Ms. Ledet, who was born in 1919, is that she employs many constructions that make her speech sound like that of the French in formal contexts. You don’t hear these constructions in the speech of Mr. Soileau and Mr. Manuel on KVPI (the former being born in 1941, the latter, I don’t know):
It’s not clear if this stems from a difference in region, in age, in interlocutor (the interviewer on En français seems rather France French), in interaction with francophones from elsewhere, or something else, but it’s interesting nonetheless. The corpus I’m constructing is small, because it’s just for a term paper, but I intend to extend it and possible perform other analyses.
English
Français
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