The French linguistic varieties of Gypsies and Travellers: an original diastratic variation perspective

Abstract

For centuries, France and the French-speaking areas of Belgium and Switzerland have been home to a large minority of Gypsies and Travellers, comprising about 300,000 individuals who all speak a form of French as their native language and form a close-knit sociolinguistic community. Their French sociolect, hitherto never described by linguists, differs from other varieties of French through a wide array of phenomena at all levels of language structure: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexical semantics and morphology. Diachronic and contrastive analysis shows that these features are either (1) non-standard, archaic or regional characteristics now lost in other varieties of European French, but kept by the Travellers as diastratic variants; (2) internal innovations within the diasystem of Traveller French; (3) outcomes of contact with heritage languages of some of these groups (Sinti Romani, Jenisch, and Alemannic and Gallo-Romance dialects). Using predominantly new fieldwork I provide here the first description of this important set of diastratic varieties of French, which represents an outstanding case of linguistic variation in a context of social separation yet with sustained contact.