Introduction (en)

All languages are fundamentally heterogeneous, exhibiting linguistic variation across different dimensions: sounds, words, sentence structure, and discourse (Gadet, 2003, 2024). Each language can be understood as a set of variants, which may be defined as distinct but equivalent forms. For example, the same word may be pronounced in different ways, such as vite ‘fast’, which may be produced as [vit] or [vɪt] in French; different constructions may be used to ask questions that are essentially equivalent in meaning, such as Est-ce que tu comprends ? and Tu comprends-tu ? ‘Do you understand?’, and so on. In the literature, linguistic variation is categorized according to a range of factors, the number and labels of which vary across approaches. For instance, Gadet (2024) identifies five major axes underlying linguistic variation. She draws an initial broad distinction between variation across speakers—variation between different speakers, considered in relation to time, space, and social position—and variation within a given speaker’s repertoire, depending on the communicative situation. Diachronic, or temporal, variation concerns the evolution of languages over time. For example, nouns such as mie (lit.: ‘crumb’), point (lit.: ‘point’), and goutte (lit.: ‘drop’), once used to mark negation, have almost entirely disappeared from contemporary usage, having been largely supplanted by pas, which has become the dominant negation marker in modern French (Eckardt, 2006). A few have survived in certain regions, such as point in southwestern Nova Scotia (Neumann-Holzschuh & Mitko, 2018). In Acadie, the verb bailler, still used today with the meaning ‘to give,’ was already attested in the 17th century as archaic (Cormier, 2009). While some words fall into disuse or become restricted to particular linguistic varieties, others emerge out of the need to name new realities. Examples include words coined by the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF), such as balado(diffusion), pourriel, and clavardage, which provide alternatives to the English borrowings podcast, spam, and chat. French is a living language, and like all living languages, it evolves: it is constantly changing and continually renewing itself. A second type of variation is diatopic (also known as spatial or regional variation), that is, variation attributable to a particular geographic area. Accents and lexical features specific to particular geographic areas are among the most salient manifestations of this type of linguistic variation. French is spoken differently across regions. Depending on the Francophone region, the same reality may be expressed using different words. For instance, patate ‘potato’ and melon d’eau ‘watermelon’ are more commonly used in Canada, whereas in France and elsewhere in Europe, pomme de terre and pastèque are more typically used. Diastratic variation (social, demographic) refers to differences stemming from an individual’s social and demographic characteristics, such as occupational affiliation, social status, age, gender, type of residence (rural vs. urban), and so on. For example, wesh, which can mean, among other things, ‘hi,’ and which originates in Maghrebi Arabic, is highly popular among young people in France and has also become well established in Quebec (David-Toleto & Antes, 2024; Martineau et al., 2022, p. 162). Similarly, there are specialized terms that do not belong to everyday French and are specific to particular professions; these are often unintelligible to non-specialists, such as névrome ‘neuroma’, a benign tumor composed of nerve fibers. Another example illustrating diastratic variation is m’as manger une pomme, a Laurentian French usage that is more typical of working-class speakers, in contrast to je vais manger une pomme ‘I will eat an apple’, which is more common among middle- and upper-class speakers (Bigot & Papen, 2022). A single speaker does not draw on …