Stereotypes: notes on the effect of identificational and dialogic functions in the interaction ...

What is it about?

The scene take place in the south of France, in a small village in the hills behind Nice where the linguistic-social situation, normal for the region, is the following: a variety of southern alpine Provençal, reputed to be the original language of the region, is practically no longer available to the villagers; only members of the oldest generation are still bilingual and, according to the situation, topics and communicational constraints, practice a language which is not the dialect but a mixed discourse. A lengthy interaction that uses only the dialect would be exceptional, whereas its occurrence in French is frequent. Switching from one language to the other is the norm, with french being the quantitatively dominant element in the mixed discourse. Young speakers, moreover, are capable (at best) only of passive understanding of the dialect and use of one or two set expressions.

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