Sociolinguistic research on Welland’s French-speaking community (1974/1975 vs 2012/2014)

In 1974 and 1975, Raymond Mougeon and Pierre Hébrard conducted two surveys among the French-speaking minority of Welland, Ontario. The first survey focused on the social and economic institutions controlled by the community (e.g., the local French-medium schools, the Francophone Catholic parish) and those which Francophones shared with Welland’s other linguistic communities (e.g., the municipal library, the municipal council). The survey collected data on the linguistic policies of such institutions and on the patterns of language use of Francophones within them. The second survey intended to examine sociolinguistic variation in the local spoken French. It was based on a corpus collected via one on one semi-directed interviews among a cross-sectional of 70 community members.
As of 2012, two surveys similar to the ones mentioned above are underway in the French-speaking community of Welland. These new surveys will bring to light the many changes that have taken place within the community over the last 38 years. The surveys are conducted under the supervision of  Raymond Mougeon in collaboration with Yves Frenette. They are part of a Major Collaborative Research Initiative: Le français à la mesure d’un continent, funded by the SSHRC (2011-2018) and carried out by a multidisciplinary team of twelve researchers from Canada, the US and France.