First Annual Illinois Romance Linguistics Lecture
in collaboration with: French Forum, Linguistics Speaker Series & SIP Lecture Series

"Language contact and lexical change in Faetar"
Naomi Nagy, Department of Linguistics, University of Toronto

Tuesday, May 1 2012, 4-5 pm
Lucy Ellis Lounge, 1080 Foreign Languages Building

I examine patterns of lexical variation in the homeland varieties of Faetar and Cellese, endangered Franco-provençal dialects spoken in two villages in southern Italy, and in Toronto, one of their largest émigré communities. While lexical change due to borrowing has been in progress for some time in Faetar and Cellese, cross-generational and diatopic comparisons within a sample of 80 speakers surprisingly indicate that its lexicon is currently quite stable. The lack of systematic patterns of differentiation across age, sex, social class, and regional groups indicates that diachronic lexical variation may not be reflected synchronically in the same ways as the structural variables that form the majority of quantitative sociolinguistic investigation. This suggests the need for further comparisons across types of variables, while maintaining consistent methods of data collection, analysis, and interpretation."