Living and working in immersion French

Abstract

Our study presents a variationist analysis of lexical variation in L2 immersion in French. Two variables are considered: a) words referring to remunerated work, e.g. travail; b) verbs used to indicate one's place of residence, e.g. habiter. One linguistic factor, priming in the interviewer's question, is shown to condition both variables. A number of social factors are also considered. The only correlation that obtains with a social factor is speakers' home language for the ‘work’ variable. The main finding from our study is that in comparison to L1 Canadian Francophones, the immersion students make use of a limited number of lexical variants and show no knowledge of highly frequent non standard L1 forms.