What is it about?
This introductory chapter presents an overview of different disciplinary perspectives on the French language and highlights new directions for scholarship on French today. The chapter is divided into seven sections, each of which corresponds to one of the sections of the handbook: Structures of French; History of the French language; Axes of Variation; French around the world; French in contact with other languages; Second-language acquisition; and French in literature, culture, arts, and the media. Each section offers a general overview of research in that domain of work on the French language, situating it within the broader research context and highlighting the particularities of the different research paradigms and traditions for French. A final concluding section presents some of the main trends that cut across the different disciplines and areas, and identifies prominent directions for future research.
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Why is it important?
This Handbook: Offers a global perspective on the French language and its varieties Combines accounts of previous scholarship with discussion of cutting-edge research Explores traditional structural linguistic topics as well as issues in sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and cultural and literary studies
Perspectives
I thought producing the Handbook was an interesting project—there’s nothing like it in English. What we liked is the opportunity to really do what we wanted with it. We were given a fairly free range to design it and shape it. And while in some ways it looks traditional, we tried to do some things which are different. We tried to bring in, for example, the whole Francophone world—getting away from the idea that you just give examples from the French of France, but that you broaden out your varieties as part of the decolonising and decentering work which is really important in all points of the curriculum now.
Professor Wendy Ayres-Bennett
University of Cambridge
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This page is a summary of: French and its Varieties, July 2024, Oxford University Press (OUP),
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198865131.013.35.
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