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Title:
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Bonjour maa: The French-Tamil Language contact situation in India
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Author:
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Leena Kelkar-Stephan
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Email:
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click here to access email
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Degree Awarded:
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Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg
, Literatur- und Sprachwissenschaften
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Degree Date:
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2005
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Linguistic Subfield(s):
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Sociolinguistics
Text/Corpus Linguistics
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Subject Language(s):
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French
Tamil
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Director(s):
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Thomas Lehmann
Ralph Ludwig
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Abstract:
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This interdisciplinary work which could be of interest to the educationist, sociologist, ethnologist, and certainly all linguists but specially creolists, tamilists, and francophonists presents research results on the language contact situation in one of the former French establishments in India, namely Pondichery on the south-east coast of India. Pondichery which remained under French rule until its transfer in 1962 to the Indian Government is the only existing French speaking community in India and the only region where French is an official language alongside Tamil. An estimated 5000 people of the population of 608 000 speak French in Pondichery. Events in the course of history, immigration and contact with neighbouring states have given rise to a complex multilingual society wherein several Indo-European and Dravidian languages are present alongside French. This linguistic treasure of Pondichery has however not attracted much attention from linguists – either foreign or Indian. Bonjour maa is the first linguistic study with an empirical approach to document the usage and varieties of French within this multilingual scenario.
The book is divided into nine chapters and the annexe contains the entire transliterated, transcribed and translated corpus issued from a selective four hours of tape recorded conversation taken during a fieldwork in Pondichery. For methodological reasons this selected corpus is divided into three sub-corpora. The first five chapters prepare the introductory frame by presenting the fieldwork, methodology and database, by describing the linguistic set-up of India in general and of Pondichery in specific, and by comparing relevant typological features of the two main languages in contact, viz. Tamil and French. The next three chapters, each based on one sub-corpus respectively, form the core of this book. The first of these chapters investigates whether the variety of French spoken by the Creole community in Pondichery can be designated as a 'Creole language'. In the second of these three chapters, formal grammatical constraints on code-switching are discussed, validity of some of them is tested on the basis of the French-Tamil corpus, and finally tendencies exhibited by the corpus are presented. In the last of these three chapters, language choice and code-switching among teachers, assistants, kindergartners and youth in various settings in bilingual education at different educational institutions are examined. The ninth chapter is a summation of the findings of the thesis. Annexe I-V, the heart of this entire research work, is not only a linguistic but also a socio-historical documentation of a broad spectrum of bilingual French-Tamil male and female speakers of different age groups, from varying socio-economic and education backgrounds in Pondichery.
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