Ottawa-Hull bilingual speakers who “borrow” English words and phrases do it in such a way that shows they consistently understand and respect the mechanics of both languages.

But University of Ottawa researchers studying this in Ottawa-Hull were perplexed when they found the pronunciation of English “loanwords” varied widely — even words like “hockey” and “bar,” which have been widely used by French speakers for more than a century.

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There’s a couple of things to be learned here, said lead researcher Shana Poplack, the Canada Research Chair in linguistics at uOttawa and founding director of the Sociolinguistics Laboratory.

First, if you rely on pronunciation as a measure of linguistic proficiency, you may be misjudging how well another person is actually speaking a language, said Poplack, who uses the English speech of singer Céline Dion and former prime minister Jean Chrétien as examples.

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“The big takeaway is not to rely on someone’s accent alone to judge how well they are speaking the language.”

The second message is that mixing anglicisms with French was not destroying the speaker’s French.

“People say that language mixing is lazy or ignorant, or that these speakers don’t know either of the languages,” said Poplack, who found that bilingual speakers’ instinctive understanding of grammar and syntax in both languages was very strong.

“Contact with English is not destroying French. This is not my opinion. These are the facts. It is based on tens of thousands of systemically examined samples. We have masses of data. People follow these rules.”

The research looked at a 3.5 million-word inventory of the spontaneous speech of a random sample of 120 French-English bilinguals in the capital region and focused on speakers with the greatest proclivity for mixing languages.

The subjects came from five neighbourhoods: Vanier, Lowertown and Westboro on the Ontario side and Mont Bleu and Vieux Hull in Quebec. They learned English from regular social exchanges, not from formal education.

The researchers used anthropological and ethnographic methods to get people to talk in the most natural way possible without being self-conscious about grammar.

“We are sociolinguists. We study language in its actual social context, as it is used spontaneously in an everyday basis. We don’t study language the way it’s supposed to be used, but the way it’s actually used,” Poplack said.

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The researchers found 43,000 sentences that showed mixed use of French and English.

Language mixing found in bilingual communities is done in three different ways:

First,”nonce borrowing” is the use of an English-origin term uttered a single time by a single speaker. These are spur-of-the-moment borrowings and don’t persist long enough to alter the structure of French, said Poplack. Here’s an example from the study: “Si les motards seraient partais ça serait un vrai petit haven.” (Translation: “If the bikers would be gone, it would be a real little haven.”)

Second, “attested loanwords” are English words that have been so widely used in French that they have been formally acknowledged in French-English dictionaries. Examples of these words include gang, first recognized in 1837; snob in 1857; bar in 1860; match in 1869; budget in 1764 and clown in 1823. Here’s an example of an attested loanword from the study: “On est allés à un bar.” (Translation: “We went to a bar.”)

“Code switches,” multi-word English utterances of two or more words, are the third kind of mixing. Here’s an example: “Parce que I was there and la seule raison c’était parce que je voulais oublier toute.” (Translation: “Because I was there and the only reason was because I wanted to forget everything.”)

These examples may appear to be a mishmash of both languages, but the bilingual speakers showed a highly structured understanding of the mechanics of both languages and where the word or series of words would fit into the sentence, said Poplack.

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If a verb was borrowed from English, it was conjugated in strict accordance with the rules for conjugating French verbs. Here’s an example, using the English verb polish: “On lavait les planchers à la main tu sais, puis après ça on polishait avec notre fessier.” (Translation: “We’d wash the floors by hand, you know, and after that we’d polish with our butt.”)

When English nouns are borrowed, they are given a gender in French and everyone in that particular community agrees on that gender. (In French Canada, it is “la job.” In France, it’s “le job.” In Canada, “gang” is feminine; in France, it’s masculine.)

“We acquire language naturally and we acquire the rules naturally. Everyone is in agreement without knowing it. The implicit rules appear to be universal,” said Poplack.

“All bilinguals share these rules, but they never explicitly learned them. No teacher is going to tell you how to code-switch and maintain the structural integrity of the sentence.”

Since the study included only speakers who were capable of producing sounds in both languages, the researchers assumed they would also follow the rules, pronouncing the words in the French way when incorporating the words into French, but pronouncing them the English way when they were code-switching. The researchers actually found that code-switches to English were rarely pronounced in English. However, words borrowed from English are often still pronounced English-style rather than in French — even those that have been in common use by French speakers for more than a century.

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This study focused on speakers who pronounced certain consonants that exist in English, but not in French, such as the “th” sound in words like “though” and “thanks,” and the “h” in “horn.” The speakers had no trouble pronouncing these consonants.

Of the 120 subjects, half used the word “hockey.” However, there was great variation in how they pronounced the consonants “h,” and “ck” and the vowels “o” and “e.”

“It makes sense. Pronunciation is a completely different level of the language. It’s unpredictable,” said Poplack. “Even if you are not pronouncing it the same way, you are making it French at the core.”

Poplack’s previous work on how bilinguals use language has stirred up controversy. Her previous research found more than 20,000 English words used by bilingual speakers, but anglicisms accounted for less than one per cent of the discourse.

She thinks the controversy is because the findings are at odds with the expectation that borrowed words will damage the language that borrows them. But researchers have found that bilingual speakers who speak at least a dozen languages, pairing all, implicitly understand the rules and use them, she said. Trilingual speakers of English, French and Vietnamese can switch three times within a sentence without violating the grammar rules of any of the languages.

“All of this pushback we get is from people who think they know how people should be using the two languages. We are discovering how they are actually used. The truth is far less deleterious than everyone thinks,” she said.

“Borrowing and switching does not lead to erosion of the language. Not speaking it leads to erosion.”

The study will be published in the March edition of Language, the journal of the Linguistic Society of America.

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