ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to investigate two areas of French exceptionality. First, there is the fact that Labovian variationist research methodologies, widely and successfully applied in Britain, Scandinavia, and anglophone and francophone North America, appear to have made almost no headway in France, without the reasons for this being obvious. Second, as even a casual reader of the sociolinguistic literature will note, there is the surprisingly high degree of what has been labelled regional dialect levelling or 'dialect supralocalization', namely, the loss of marked regional forms in favour of geolinguistically unmarked variants, which is reported to have taken place within the Hexagon. The chapter considers the way in which change is transmitted, and how the peculiarities of urban structure influence the nature of change. Nigel Armstrong observes that the French situation seems unusual because the adjustments needed to align oneself with a higher social group are generally unavailable in pronunciation.
