A linguistic description of the French spoken on the Port-au-Port Peninsula of western Newfoundland

• Main Author: Barter, Geraldine
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Memorial University of Newfoundland 1986
• Subjects: Newfoundland
• Online Access: https://research.library.mun.ca/7936/; https://research.library.mun.ca/7936/1/Barter_MaryGeraldine.pdf; https://research.library.mun.ca/7936/3/Barter_MaryGeraldine.pdf

This study is a general survey of linguistic aspects of the French dialect spoken in several small communities on the Port-au-Port Peninsula in western Newfoundland. The study is based on tape-recorded folktales and interviews of free conversation with informants from these French communities made in the past fifteen years, with added interpretations attained from the author’s native experience with the dialect. -- The study is divided into four chapters. The first chapter is a resume of the main historical events leading to the establishment of French settlers on the Newfoundland shores and a discussion of the history of this small population to the present. -- Chapter II gives a general description of the grammar and syntax of the language. Noun, pronoun, adjective and verb forms are described and each point discussed, with few exceptions, is illustrated by direct quotations from the recorded corpus. -- Chapter III is a study of the vocabulary of the local French language, arranged in the following categories: The Land, The Sea, The Family, Human Affairs and Social Attitudes, and Other Terms, all presented with evidence of local pronunciation and typical contexts. This chapter concludes with a section on anglicisms used in the speech of the inhabitants. - The final chapter describes aspects of the phonology of the local speakers, with an account of the distinctive consonants, vowels, diphthongs, and an indication of their principal phonetic qualities. The following features in particular, are discussed: palatalization, voicing and unvoicing, and methathesis. -- The study concludes with a selection of transcriptions of the connected speech of speakers from three of the main French-speaking communities, presented in a form of spelling suggesting the pronunciation.