National Science Foundation press release:
 With National Science Foundation support, Drs. Cynthia Fox and Jane Smith will conduct three years of linguistic research on a unique variety of French. This language was brought to the northeastern part of the United States by French Canadian immigrants from Quebec and Acadians from the Maritimes over a period from the end of the 18th century into the 20th. These Franco-Americans constitute a significant segment of the populations of the northeastern states. Thanks to an ideology that supported the preservation of their ancestral heritage, they represent the second largest concentration of French speakers in the United States. But in the past 40 years, both the number of these French speakers and the frequency of their use of French have declined dramatically. 

Two goals of this project are to collect a sample of Franco-American French and to study its current vitality. Interviews with Franco-Americans in Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island will be recorded.  These data will address several interrelated questions: (1) How does this variety of French differ from the French spoken in Canada? (2) How did these differences come about? For example, how has English influenced this variety of French? (3) Does this French vary across communities? (4) What factors have led some Franco-Americans to keep using their French and others to stop using it?

Answers to such questions improve scientific understanding of the complex ways that languages and their speakers change over time and geography. This research thus has both historical and linguistic value. The project will also  provide training for future researchers by involving students in all phases and in a unique partnership between the State University of New York at Albany and the University of Maine.  Of greatest importance, this research project will involve community members in documenting and thus helping to preserve their linguistic heritage.

University of Maine Press Release:
When North American French scholar Jane Smith joined the University of Maine faculty in 1994, she was surprised to find that Maine's Franco-Americans had no corpus of their language - no body of recordings preserving the spoken word - other than a few taped interviewed in the Maine Folklife Center archives.  That will change this fall when the first sociolinguistic study of Franco-American French begins in the state, led by Smith, a UMaine assistant professor of French, and Cynthia Fox, associate professor of French Studies at the University at Albany. The three-year collaborative study is funded by a.
Franco-Americans in New England and New York state represent the second largest concentration of French speakers in the United States, Smith and Fox noted in their grant proposal. Yet they remain the only significant group of North American French speakers whose language has not been the subject of systematic, representative sampling and research.

In the sociolinguistic study, the researchers will be looking at "who uses the language - and how." In particular, they will investigate its linguistic structure and "the human dynamics behind the language" in an effort to understand what social or economic factors influence language maintenance or shift.
Their research, based on interviews with Franco-Americans, will explore such areas as family background, linguistic history, ties with French-speaking Canada and France, and participation in ethnic activities. They also will study dialect variations between Quebec and Acadian French in Franco-American French, as well as the influence of English on the language.

Smith and Fox will assess the vitality of French existing in [delete: the] eight communities in the Northeast - Van Buren, Waterville and Biddeford, Maine; Gardner and Southbridge, Mass.; Berlin, N.H.; Bristol, Conn.; and Woonsocket, R.I.   Large numbers of Quebecois settled in these cities and towns, some of which also drew Acadians from the Maritimes or Northern Maine's St. John Valley.  Van Buren stands apart in that, because it was originally settled by Acadians any immigrants who arrived later found a whole community that was already French-speaking.

The communities were selected based on a number of criteria, including a minimum of 20 percent of the population with French Canadian ancestry, and the percentage of the population that claimed in the 1990 census to use French at home.

In each city, 30 tape-recorded interviews will be conducted in French with Franco-Americans in three age groups - 5-30, 31-59, and 60 and older. The degree of differences between the ages will be a function of the community, says Smith. For instance, in Van Buren, 81 percent of all residents still speak French in the home, compared to 7 percent of the population of Bristol, Conn.

Other members of each community will be invited to assist in the interviews, thereby contributing to the preservation of their linguistic heritage. 

In addition to providing baseline data on the sociolinguistics of language choice and change in eight Franco-American communities, the project will provide a permanent linguistic record of the largely undocumented variety of North American French. Data have been gathered by linguists for Quebec, Acadian and Cajun French.  "Now it's up to us to do the same for Franco-American French," says Smith.  At a time when the number of fluent speakers is decreasing and the language is increasingly "giving way to English," it is hoped that the involvement of community members in this project will encourage people in their language maintenance efforts, Smith says. 

Contact Information:

Jane S. Smith, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of French
Department of Modern Languages and Classics
University of Maine
5742 Little Hall
Orono, ME   04469-5742
(207) 581-2079

And

Cynthia Fox: (518) 442-4102