ABSTRACT
The essentially composite nature of urban dialect is underlined by Marius Lateur in the Avant-propos to his Lexique du parler populaire et ouvrier des régions minières d'Artois (1951: 11): ‘Notre langage populaire est un mélange de patois picard de nos campagnes artésiennes et minières, de français — parfois démarqué —, de “rouchi” 1 et de mots nés au fond de la mine’ (‘Our vernacular is a mixture of Picard patois from our Artesian country and mining areas, French (sometimes of a locally marked kind), “Rouchi”, and words born at the coal face’). In this chapter I identify some of the linguistic forms that entered the dialect mix as Avion grew from minor village to industrial town. I begin with a description of modern Picard (3.1) and of français populaire (3.2), before turning my attention (in 3.3) to phonological features associated by various commentators with Northern Regional French (NRF). Where examples are taken from data collected for the Avion study, the informant is numbered and named with the relevant recording reference from the corpus, for example ‘1.Herve/19B’.
