Contenu du sommaire : Français d'Afrique. En Afrique. Hors d'Afrique

From the earliest studies on French in Africa, the main goal was didactic during the first post-colonial period, research interests have been diverse in each country, as a function of the needs and evolution of French –themselves depending on their relationships with the language. Yet up to the beginning of the 21st Century, the dominant frameworks in descriptive linguistics, sociolinguistics and the study of contact languages were those developed by French scholars in collaboration with African researchers or re-worked on the basis of North American models in terms of various strands of African fieldwork. For some years now, the contribution of African studies has been both original and particularly useful for general linguistics: contextualized studies of the ways in which language functions, work on youth languages and mixed languages, and action research which associates French and African languages in the interests of development.

The transformation of the object French in Africa over the last 50 years goes hand in hand with the transformation of sociolinguistics in the broadest sense. Studies initially focused on mother tongue interference with French among African speakers, based on “on-the-fly” surveys; more recently, they have concentrated on language-related social practices particularly in urban areas. We will argue that French in Africa is an opportunity for research on spoken French, and for the study of language in interaction in general. The major challenge of its constitution as an object of future linguistic study will be to develop a methodology inspired by corpus linguistics and concerned with the intrinsic characteristics of the data. The most original instances among these data are oral, e.g. related to time and the discursive elaboration activity of the speaker.

In this article, we are concerned with the phonological studies of African Frenches which have been conducted within the project Phonologie du français contemporain (pfc). The aim of the article is double. First, we discuss the application of the project's research protocol in Africa. Second, we propose a summary of these studies and some thoughts on their scientific interest, in particular for the field of language contact. We argue that the data should be considered as a source of information on how multilingual speakers express themselves in a monolingual mode and that they are, for that reason, an interesting departure point for a discussion on phenomena related to individual and societal multilingualism.

This contribution analyses the “entextualization” of African French through texts published during the colonial and postcolonial period and connects production, reception and circulation of texts displaying encapsulated features of “African French”. It shows how this entextualization is co-constructed by French and African writers, and questions the linguistic ideologies underlying these practices.

The purpose of this article is to discuss the notions of African French, variety and accent, following on from the reflections of Féral (2010), by focusing on the phonetic and prosodic dimension of the French spoken in Africa. Based on the analysis of phonetic variation in a Cameroonian journalist in video interactions collected on Youtube, the aim will be to question the usefulness of the notion of Cameroonian or African accent, defined as a phonological variety. We will show that, when trying to describe the variability of socially situated and necessarily heterogeneous language practices, the notion of style, conceived as a process of meaning making through language, is more appropriate than the reifying notions of Cameroonian French, variety and accent.

This contribution analyzes stylized uses of “Ivorian French” in oral performances by White French people who have been expatriates in the Ivory Coast. These practices enable us to see “Ivory Coast French” as a stylized resource of a verbal repertoire, and the aim is to examine, as finely as possible, the effects of these situated practices. The theoretical framework of the study is interactional sociolinguistics.

In this article, I explore the experiences with French of migrants from the Democratic Republic of Congo in Norway and relate the object “Frenches in Africa” to the field of sociolinguistics of migrations. My approach is emic and biographical, and through an analysis of narratives, I aim at discussing what French represents for these individuals. The narratives indicate that French indexes social inequalities and at several times, they evoke negative consequences of its presence in the Congo. In Norway, they do not see their competences in French as an advantage. French is rather constructed as a low mobility resource.