The many permutations of spoken English have called for an interrogation into the notions of 'standard English' and 'native accents'. Despite their problematic nature, these terms remain commonly used, and familiarity with 'standard', inner-circle varieties of English is typical among L2 English speakers, differences in education and language…

This article compares French and Corsican middle school language policy. Above the micro-level of the classroom, and below the macro-level of the EU (or beyond), I analyze two policies sandwiched at the meso-level, national (France) and regional (Corsica) middle school curricula. Based on a content analysis of two curricular policy texts, the…

In contrast to French, the vast majority of regional languages of France can be considered as under-resourced. In this article, we present the results of a research project aiming to produce annotated resources for three regional languages of France: Alsatian, Occitan, and Picard. These languages cover three different language families (Germanic…

This article concerns Northern Catalonia, the part of the Catalan-speaking area that today is in France. A Catalan-speaking region until the first half of the twentieth century, the effects of Frenchification -- the acceptance of the French political and economic project in the contemporary era -- and the multiple demographic changes of the…

Little is known about recruiters' attitudes to hiring 'native' and 'non-native speakers', or the factors which might influence their potential preference for the former group. Of the four studies conducted thus far, three were carried out in the US or the UK, and are over a decade old (Clark & Paran, 2007; Mahboob et al., 2004; Moussu, 2006).…

Six experiments explored Parisian French-learning infants' ability to segment bisyllabic words from fluent speech. The first goal was to assess whether bisyllabic word segmentation emerges later in infants acquiring European French compared to other languages. The second goal was to determine whether infants learning different dialects of the same…

This paper presents children's writing in their vernacular family language, Moroccan Arabic. It first provides some background to the family and school literacies of nine-year-old children of Moroccan Arabic (MA) background growing up in France with French literacy practices at school and Written Arabic literacy practices in the home. The paper…

This article examines the current situation of regional language bilingual primary education in Alsace and contends that the regional language presents a special case in the context of France. The language comprises two varieties: Alsatian, which traditionally has been widely spoken, and Standard German, used as the language of reference and…

This article examines how a second language (L2) dialect affects how accurately the L2 is perceived and produced. Specifically, the study examined differences between the production and perception of French vowels /i/, /y/, and /u/ by learners of either Quebec French (QF) or European French (EF). These vowels differ across the two varieties, both…

This study examines children's metaphonological awareness for accent-related information in connected speech. In the first experiment, 5- to 6-year-old French-speaking children were asked to discriminate between Southern and Northern accented French in a sentence categorization task. It was found that these children were not able to reliably…

Shortened version of this paper was presented in New York, N.Y., March 14, 1970, at the Fifteenth Annual National Conference on Linguistics sponsored by The International Linguistic Association. (RS)

Instruction was initiated in 1968, in isolated attempts, and gained recognition only in 1974 by virtue of the Deixonne Law. The present state of the efforts, and problems engendered by dialectal differences, orthography, lack of materials, teacher preparation, and disparity of student levels are detailed. (Text is in French.) (MSE)

Introduces a series of articles; explains the significance of these heterogeneous languages and their teaching as they relate to the French language and as they contribute to or gain from linguistic study. (Text is in French.) (MSE)

Sketches the history of usage of the dialect; the meager results of a survey of schools offering programs in Flemish tend to confirm that it receives little consideration, and that there is difficulty even in defining dialectal limits. Bilingual preoccupations tend toward the development of Dutch. (Text is in French.) (MSE)

Analyzes the political motivations for and history of a 1951 law promoting the study of Breton, Basque, Catalan, and Occitan. (Text is in French.) (MSE)