Timothy Pooley, Chtimi: The urban vernaculars of northern France. (Applications in French linguistics, 2.) Clevedon (UK) & Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters, 1996. Pp. viii, 318. Hb $99.00.

Abstract

Pooley sets out in this book to study Chtimi, the drôle de français ‘funny French’ (p. 2) of the Lille area, the northernmost region of France – and to show, through his analysis of two corpora of spontaneous speech, “the transition from patois to accent du Nord” in the speech of the working-class inhabitants of Roubaix and Rouges-Barres. The result, carried out with methodological rigor, is an important addition to the field of French sociolinguistics; it will be welcomed not only by scholars seeking a detailed analysis of the key features of northern Regional French, but also by those interested in ongoing changes in popular French. Pooley is particularly interested in tracing the obsolescence of Chtimi through its convergence with the closely related popular French register; in doing so, he provides a wealth of information about the phonological, morphological, and syntactical features of Chtimi, as used by his sources, and about popular French.