This course deals with geographical and social variation in the French-speaking
world.  The first part of the course deals with geographical variation:  we
will discuss the methods of traditional dialectology, the making of linguistic
atlases, more recent trends in modern dialectology.  We will also familiarize
ourselves with the main Oil languages and see how these differ from what we
call regional French.  We will finally examine North American varieties of
French and will try to understand how they have developed, that is, how they
retain features from Old World French while also diverging from their parent
varieties in important ways.  Contact with English will obviously be discussed
as one of the sources of divergence.  The second part of the course deals with
social variation.  We will see how sociolinguistics has developed in order to
complement dialectology and to allow researchers to study variation in urban
settings.  We will discuss the concepts of norm, social and stylistic variation,
and we will try to understand better why so many ways of saying the same
things tend to coexist within a single language.