Thompson, Jennifer A.2024-08-152024-08-1519861986https://hdl.handle.net/1828/19899The principal goal of t his thesis is to determine whether Chiac, a dia­lect of Acadian French spoken in Moncton, New Brunswick, forms a dialect in its own right, or is simply a stage in the evolution of the traditional Aca­dian dialect of the surrounding area. The basic difference between Chiac and the traditional dialect of the region is t he amount of anglicisation found in each. The Acadians were a very isolated people over a whole century, longer in some cases, and as a result their language has retained many fea­tures of t he seventeenth century French that their ancestors spoke. Over the past century more and more Acadians have been moving to the urban centres in New Brunswick, to be surrounded by anglophones. Living in cit­ies that are over sixty percent English, as Moncton was once, the Acadians cannot avoid some interference of English in their French. In the case of Chiac, anglicisation accounts for at least twenty-five percent of the dialect, and probably more. In order to determine whether or not the changes to the urban dialect are enough for it to be considered a separate dialect from the rural speech, nineteen informants were asked to participate in tape-recorded interviews. Four were unilingual and from rural areas, three were bilingual and from rural areas, and twelve were bilingual and from the greater Moncton area. The informants were asked to read a passage from a newspaper or to answer questions that would elicit certain sounds in the responses so that the phonological features of each speech type could be examined for instanc­es of change. After being asked to describe pictures or to name objects in the room, the informants were asked to discuss any topic of interest to them. The results of these parts of the interviews were examined for any regular changes or instances of language transference. There were morpho­logical, lexica l, semantic and syntactic changes and transference that seemed to occur mainly according to age and level of bilingualism. The results of the interviews in general showed a marked difference in speech habits between the rural and the urban informants. The fact that the urban speakers, particularly the younger ones, had lost some of the features of the Acadian dialect and gained some from English and from Standard and Quebec French makes a good case for Chiac being considered as a sepa­rate dialect from the traditional speech of the region.100 pagesAvailable to the World Wide WebThesis