The Future of Ontario French

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe present study is a Labovian sociolinguistic analysis of forms used to express the future tense in the spoken French of adolescents residing in Ontario, Canada. Two primary variants are examined: a) the periphrastic future (e.g.elle va partir); and b) the inflected future (e.g.elle partira). The general trend that emerges is that distribution rates of the periphrastic future are markedly higher than previous accounts of the variable and that many speakers are in fact categorical users of the periphrastic form in certain contexts. Note, too, that negation is not a strong predictor for all speakers with respect to the choice of the inflected future, a finding that is in strong contrast to previous analyses of the variable in Laurentian varieties of spoken French in Canada. After presenting the general results, we provide an in-depth analysis of the linguistic and social factors that condition variant use.