Followed by a pub social- your first drink is on us!
English in Ontario French: Patterns of Lexical Borrowing
This talk examines the use of English lexical borrowings in Ontario French, focusing on the francophone community of Casselman, Ontario. The study aims to identify the linguistic and social factors that influence the use of English borrowings and to compare the results with previous research conducted in the Ottawa–Hull region, particularly the work of Poplack et al. (1988).
The analysis is based on a corpus of 62 semi-directed sociolinguistic interviews recorded between 2009 and 2011 with francophone speakers from Casselman. All participants were bilingual to varying degrees, and the interviews were conducted in informal conversational settings. Borrowings were classified following Poplack et al. (1988) framework into several categories, including nonce borrowings, idiosyncratic borrowings, limited borrowings, recurrent borrowings, and widespread borrowings.
Overall, English borrowings remain relatively rare in the corpus, representing about 1% of all word tokens. However, they show considerable lexical diversity, accounting for about 7.5% of the lexical types in the corpus. Most borrowings are nouns, while other grammatical categories such as verbs and adjectives occur less frequently.
The study also examines several social factors that may influence borrowing, including gender, age, education level, social class, and language dominance. The results show that younger speakers and those with lower levels of education tend to use more borrowings. In contrast to previous findings from the Ottawa–Hull corpus, social class does not appear to play a significant role in Casselman.
A comparison with earlier studies reveals both similarities and differences. The overall frequency of borrowings and their linguistic behavior strongly support Poplack (2018) model of lexical borrowing: borrowings are typically well integrated into French syntax and are dominated by nouns. However, the social distribution of borrowings differs between communities. While social class is an important factor in Ottawa–Hull, age and education appear to be more relevant in Casselman.
The results therefore suggest that while lexical borrowing follows robust linguistic constraints across communities, the social diffusion of borrowings varies depending on local sociolinguistic dynamics. In other words, borrowing may obey universal linguistic principles, but its social life remains locally shaped.