“What do they say in Quebec?”

Abstract

This paper examines how non-binary French-speakers in Quebec express their gender identities in speech. I argue that reformist efforts regarding neutral French should include increased attention to how neutral French is done in informal spoken Quebec French, as I examine how current recommendations based on spelling can fail to be taken up in speech, and how regional varieties can sometimes require different prescriptions. Based on a preliminary field study with eight participants who are part of this community of practice, I find that participants did not use any audible neologisms, such as the ones recommended for writing and for other varieties. Not only did they all use gendered language to refer to non-binary referents, although at a much lower frequency than for binary referents, but they also used gender-avoidance strategies in most cases. I also show that third person clitics seem to be the word category most resistant to neutralization or avoidance for speakers of this variety. I argue that these results point to the development of two distinct systems of neutral French, one for speech and one for writing.

Pluri-Grammars for Pluri-Genders: Competing Gender Systems in the Nominal Morphology of Non-Binary French

“…Notwithstanding the fact that much has been written in recent years on the emergence of non-binary English linguistic innovations (e.g., Beemyn and Rankin 2011;Bornstein [1994Bornstein [ ] 1995Corwin 2009;Factor and Rothblum 2008), particularly neutral pronouns (Baron 2020;Bergman 2017;Feinberg 1998), comparatively little has been written on non-binary French forms, especially neo-morphemes marking non-binary gender on nouns and adjectives; existing research either collects data exclusively on written forms (Shroy 2017), focuses on pronominal forms (Kosnick 2019), or describes a limited number of oral agreement markers (Dumais 2021;Knisely 2020). We know that language usage by non-binary Francophones varies considerably (Hord 2016;Knisely 2020; La Vie en Queer 2018b; Shroy 2017).…”