ABSTRACT
The decline of Picard in the north was already well advanced by the 1980s and early 1990s, a period of intense activity for linguists seeking to describe or analyse its terminal phase. A consequence of contact between French and local dialects has been the emergence, particularly in urban areas at some distance from Paris, of varieties seen to be intermediate between them. In the first half of the twentieth century, as French began to make significant inroads into areas of provincial France where it had not previously been spoken, new varieties emerged from contact between local and national norms. Central to most definitions of Regional French is the claim that it preserves features from the displaced dialects or regional languages. A number of studies have examined contact phenomena in ‘new towns’, resulting from planned urban development, or other comparable situations in which rapid, large-scale in-migration has occurred, invariably, but not exclusively, from the geographical hinterland.
